Writing systems/LanguageConverter

Translated version of zh:H:AC. Don't even think about translating it back into Chinese. zh:H:AC

LanguageConverter (LC) is a system for converts between language variants via means of character/word replacement.

The original reason for deploying LC comes from Chinese Wikipedia, as users from all over the world use different variants of Chinese (or more precisely, Mandarin). Differences between these variants include script usage (simplified or traditional? Latin or Cyrillic?), local terminologies (should we write "blog" as 網誌 "web log" or use something phonetic?), as well as other written differences induced by local dialects. A group of a specific set of such selections constitute a "language variant". In order to avoid forcing users into writing and reading one single variant, MediaWiki sites uses programmatic conversion to offer a target variant to "convert" an article's source code, which may be a mix of different variant, to. This mixture, however, does require some care in handling.

LC is built into MediaWiki as a pass in dealing with the wikitext source code. Running on a form of proto-HTML (some "almost html" step), it is able to convert regular content as well as category links.

In most cases, LC operates according to a predefined table of words and characters. By including certain instructions in the source code, users can customize conversion rules, include some one-off "manual" conversion tags, or even disable the conversion completely. Editors can verify the output of the convertor by switching variants after saving or by using the PreviewWithVariant gadget.