Add tamazight central atlas morocco (tzm) language to l.d.o

I made a mistake when posting it originally. The TLA for Tamazight Central Atlas is tzm (not tmz). Thanks

I cannot find any Drupal translation project for Tamazight language, which is not an official language in any countries.
If Tamazigh language would be added to the server, which writing system should be used (Tifinagh, the Latin alphabet, or the Arabic script)?

Also, do you have a few people to help out? Even given all our simplification tools, translating Drupal is not a small effort.

@Kiam: whether a language is "official" in any country is of no concern as far as Drupal translations are concerned.

Personally, I specifically appreciate translations into so called minority languages. A translation project can be easily created.

I agree with Gabor that this is not something that an individual alone can do, it is a lot of work.

What I meant is that as it is not an official language, it's more probable people would use the official language for the region they come from. The language is then mainly a spoken language for which only recently a writing system has been added.

Thanks for your prompt replies guys.

1) Yes, I have a team of people interesting in contributing to this translation. We are working on a website about Amazigh culture, the tamazight language and community type stuff.

2) Tamazight is now being taught in some regions schools in Morocco and is growing in prominence. It has been spoken for many centuries but has only more recently been committed to writing in various scripts.

3) The plan is to do the website with latin script and arabic script options. The Tifnagh script is more problematic and is not being considered at the moment.

4) Given the scale of the task, it would make sense for us to focus on one script option first so we'll initially focus on latin script.

Thanks for your help.

I've been thinking some more about this (see my last comment above).

Realistically, we're not needing to translate the whole of Drupal into Tamazight - just those elements of the user interface that anonymous and authenticated users (i.e. not admins) are going to see. So, we wouldn't need to translate the adminstration since our admin team will work in either English or French.

This limited translation would still be useful to other developers looking to work in Tamazight - there are a few ;-).

What do you guys think? Is a partial translation an option?

It is always an option, but this is a misconception coming back from time to time that you can just translate the user interface of Drupal without translating the admin interface. Drupal has no way to tell whether a translation function was invoked as part of displaying an admin page or a user facing page or whether the same strings are used at both places. There are functions and forms reused on both the "front end" and "backend" of Drupal and users can have multiple fine grained roles which might let them access to certain things (forum moderation or content administration for example) without access to other parts of the backend.

You are definitely not crushed if you don't translate the whole of the Drupal interface though.

IMO yes, all translations start with the frontend strings. You can translate the admin part later.

That all makes sense.

Given all of the above, I'm ready to get started on Tamazight with latin script.

Once it's setup, how can others join the team working on it (people I know or strangers who want to get involved in the project).

Thanks again for responding so promptly - I'm so impressed!

localize.drupal.org is a normal organic groups install so people can join your group easily.

Ok, I was trying to educate myself from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Morocco_Tamazight on the number of plural variants you might have and the formula to pick either one. Given that http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/l10n/pluralforms did not contain your plural data. Looks like we only need to dig up this formula for your language before I can create the language / group. Since you know this language best of us, can you please help?

Still waiting on your reply. I cannot create this team without knowing your plural formula.

Sorry for the long delay...been away. It looks like the tamazight translation project is on hold for now. The team has decided that it isn't ready to take this project on and they're the language experts - I'm just the techy. Sorry to have wasted your time on this.

Postponed then?