Dialects in Transifex

[imajit]

Part of #9686
Topic: We currently have 14 languages supported in Public Lab Transifex Team https://www.transifex.com/publiclab/publiclaborg/dashboard/ .
Problem: Transifex supports multiple dialects of the same language, but for every dialect, we need to translate all the strings again.
In cases where there is overlap in dialects that is they have the same translation of a word, then in that cases, we have to copy the same translation to the newly added dialect, assign a new translator to review it and then add new files for the added dialect.
Possible Solution: I did not find a way to directly mark words common to 2 dialects, but one way we can speed up the reviewing process is if we set the source of the dialect to be the main language like for Spanish dialects we can set the source language as Spanish instead of English.
Changes in the code:
We can also change the translation function such that for missing dialect words instead of English we show translated word of its source language for example in Spanish dialects if the translation of the word is missing then we show Spanish translation of it instead of English ones.

I'm not aware of how different Spanish dialects are from one another so can't be sure how helpful it will be to show Spanish words for its dialect but if the user has trouble reading it, he/she can always switch back to English.
@ebarry @jywarren

[ebarry]

Thank you for posting this @imajit! I really appreciate your deep dive into dialects.

Just one small bit of context to add from my side, the user that requested the three new dialects does not exist in the Transifex system, which is confusing—see screenshot. What I take from this is that we may not have a "champion" for these dialects. But that's OK, i approved the three additional Spanishes, and also the alternative Hindi language request, based on input from @grvsachdeva :) :D

[jywarren]

OK, wow this is interesting. So for dialects, if we have the idea of dialects branching off a language that's not the "trunk", that does seem like it could work. @ebarry do we have anyone we can ask about this idea?