What’s Special about myLanguage?
Increasingly, UserBase pages are beginning to use Special:myLanguage in links, so what is special about that? Well, it depends whether you are a reader or a translator.
For readers, it will mean that increasingly they will be taken to pages in their own language. The way it works is that it is aware of the language that you set in your preferences as your root language – that is myLanguage. If you click on a link it checks to see if there is a page available in that language, and if there is, that page is displayed. If no page exists, the English one is displayed instead. Of course, it only works for those pages that are within our new translation system, so we do need help to enable more of those pages, whether by fresh translations or by copy-and-paste from the old ones.
What’s advantage to translators? Simply that they no longer have to check for the existence of translated pages before deciding how to define the link. Using Special:myLanguage means that the moment a suitably translated page is available, it will be displayed from the link. That’s a time-saver.
It will take time to get all pages to take advantage of this, but it’s certainly a job worth doing, and one that you can help with in the odd hours when you need a change from your usual work.
