History: PivotLanguage
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Pivot Language is a basic notion of translation management, which all programmers and administrators of a multilingual CMS should be aware of, although it doesn't necessarily entail the development of a specific feature.
Pivot Language notion comes the difficulty that organisations meet when dealing with a large number of translations and languages: there comes a limit where you don't find enough translators for one language. We are not talking here of the unequality of languages in terms of quantity of native speakers, but about the unequality of languages in termes of people who can read them as a second language, and translate them into their native language.
For instance, In France many people can read English, few people can read Korean.
When you run a site with more than two languages, ideally you recruit translators for all possible languages combinations. The number of those combinations is not exactly the number of language pairs, but the number of Source language -> Target language combinations, that is the number of language pairs x 2.
For instance, in France many people will be able to translate from English to French. You should not assume that the same people will be able to translate from French to English.
The ambition of European community institutions was at first to recruit translators for any Source language -> Target language combination. However those institutions deal with a large number of publications, and although they had too many candidates for English to French and French to English, they could not find enough people for Danish to Maltese, Finnish to Portuguese... in order to translate everything.
Therefore it was decided that any document meant to be translated in all languages of the European Union should translated in English or French first, and then translated into all languages. Thus translation managers only have to recruit translators from English or French towards native language.
This means that many documents will in fact be second translations, and not the direct translation of the original.
How far this concerns the development and administration of Tikiwiki is still to be precised, and you are warmly invited to complete this page.