Help:Multilingual support

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Articles on the English Wikipedia may contain words or texts written in different languages and scripts. To be able to correctly view and edit there articles requires that you have the appropriate fonts installed and to have correctly configured your operating system and browser. This guide will help you to do so.

Contents 1 Overview 1.1 Unicode 2 Scripts 2.1 East Asian 2.2 Indic 3 Special cases 3.1 Esperanto 3.2 Romanian 4 Notes

[edit] Overview

[edit] Unicode

Articles on Wikipedia are encoded using Unicode (specifically UTF-8)^[1], an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. Because Unicode is backwards compatible with ASCII and Latin-1, and most modern browsers have at least basic Unicode support, most users will will experience little difficulty reading and editing Wikipedia.

For older browsers, MediaWiki, the Wikipedia software, serves the wikitext in a safe mode upon editing. Characters that cannot be represented in ASCII are temporarily converted to hexadecimal character references, looking like ሴ. Existing hexadecimal character references get an additional leading zero so they are not converted to actual characters when the page is saved, and look like ሴ. Likewise, to create a hexadecimal character reference in safe mode, not the character itself, a leading zero should be added. One can check whether safe mode is used by editing this section. If M looks like M rather than M, safe mode is used.

[edit] Scripts

[edit] East Asian

Main article: Help:Multilingual support (East Asian)

Script	Correct rendering	Your computer
Traditional Chinese		人人生來自由， 在尊嚴和權利上一律平等。 他們有理性和良心， 請以手足關係的精神相對待。
Simplified Chinese		人人生来自由， 在尊严和权利上一律平等。 他们有理性和良心， 请以手足关系的精神相对待。
Japanese		すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由であり、 かつ、尊厳と権利と について平等である。 人間は、理性と良心とを授けられており、 互いに同胞の精神をもって行動しなければならない。
Korean		모든 인간은 태어날 때부터 자유로우며 그 존엄과 권리에 있어 동등하다. 인간은 천부적으로 이성과 양심을 부여받았으며 서로 형제애의 정신으로 행동하여야 한다.

[edit] Indic

Main article: Help:Multilingual support (Indic)

The following table compares how a correctly enabled computer would render the following scripts with how your computer renders them:

Script	Correct rendering	Your computer
Bengali		ক + ি → কি
Devanagari		क + ि → कि
Gujarati		ક + િ → કિ
Gurmukhi		ਕ + ਿ → ਕਿ
Kannada		ಕ + ಿ → ಕಿ
Malayalam		ക + െ → കെ
Oriya		କ + େ → କେ
Tibetan		ར + ྐ + ྱ → རྐྱ
Tamil		க + ே → கே
Telugu		య + ీ → యీ

[edit] Special cases

[edit] Esperanto

in edit box	in database and output
S	S
Sx	Ŝ
Sxx	Sx
Sxxx	Ŝx
Sxxxx	Sxx
Sxxxxx	Ŝxx

Mediawiki installations configured for Esperanto use UTF-8 for storage and display. However when editing the text is converted to a form that is designed to be easier to edit with a standard keyboard.

The characters for which this applies are: Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, Ŝ, Ŭ, ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ. you may enter these directly in the edit box if you have the facilities to do so. However when you edit the page again you will see them encoded as Sx. This form is referred to as "x-sistemo" or "x-kodo". In order to preserve round trip capability when one or more x's follow these characters or their non-accented forms (A, G, H, J, S, U, c, g, h, j, s, u), the number of x's in the edit box is double the number in the actual stored article text.

For example, the interlanguage link [[en:Luxury car]] to en:Luxury car has to be entered in the edit box as [[en:Luxxury car]] on eo:. This has caused problems with interwiki update bots in the past.

[edit] Romanian

The Romanian alphabet contain an S-comma (Ș ș) and T-comma (Ț ț). These character were added to Unicode 3.0 at the request of the Romanian stadadization institute. Font support for these characters is poor, so the Romanain Wikipedia represents these letters with an S-cedilla (Ş ş) and T-cedilla (Ţ ţ) instead.^[2]

[edit] Notes