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Add little blogpost about the language picker

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Pieter Vander Vennet 2022-02-25 01:55:40 +01:00
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# The language-picker
(Originally published as diary-entry)
In my [little OpenStreetMap-editor](https://mapcomplete.osm.be) translations are provided by contributors on [hosted weblate](https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/mapcomplete/), where thousands of text snippets have been translated already in the past year - which is awesome.
However, the language picker was a bit dry: it used to have codes for every langauge, e.g. `nl`, `en`, `ja`, 'pt_BR', 'zh_Hant'... Quite boring and not really user-friendly - but easy to implement.
Today, I decided to give these an overhaul. I wanted to show proper language names in them. But: in which _language_ should we show the language overview?
Should we show the language option in the language itself? Or should the languages be shown in the _current language_? Showing in the _current language_ also means that the name of every language should be translated too - a huge task... Also, translating every language has the drawback that, if a user accidentally selects a language in a foreign writing system, they'll won't be able to find their language in all the "gibberish".
### Best of both worlds
I decided to offer the best of both worlds: in the menu, first language name is shown as the native speaker speaks it, followed by the language name in the _current language_ (except if both are the same)
This means that, in all circumstances, everyone can find their language.
But, where to fetch every language name in every language?
# Wikidata to the rescue
Of course, the internet must have a list of languages translated in every language. But where to find it or compile it?
I decided to have a look at one of the biggest repositories of knowledge: Wikidata. They do have an entry for every language (e.g. [Dutch](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7411)). To fetch every [modern language](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1288568), we turn to the SPARQL-endpoint with the following query:
``` sparql
SELECT ?lang ?label ?code
WHERE
{
?lang wdt:P31 wd:Q1288568.
?lang rdfs:label ?label.
?lang wdt:P424 ?code
}
```
This one fetches all languages and uses the labels in every language as their translation. With a Typescript these can be downloaded and used as translation.
## The messy real world
Of course, real life isn't as easy. There are dialects, differences in notation between Weblate and Wikipedia (e.g. `zh-hant` vs `zh-Hant`). But with a few exceptions, this can be fixed too. Some pragmatism doesn't hurt - even though it is nice that it works for most cases automatically.
[The full script is available here](https://github.com/pietervdvn/MapComplete/blob/develop/scripts/fetchLanguages.ts).
# Results
![](./Language-picker-english.png)
![](./Language-picker-Chinese.png)