Hi everyone
I wanted to translate Blender but while shuffling through the blender-translations repository I found that in the languages file my language has a comment that says # Explicitly forbidden!.
I cannot find what that means anywhere and would like to understand the implications before I get on it.
Thanks
What language you are talking about?
Maybe your language has special characters that cause problems. In the code of Python, C++, etc.
(Even when you write text in the code that should only be displayed on the screen, and it contains special characters, can break the code)
Or when you are from Papua New Guinea, they maybe canât figure out which of the over 200 Papua New Guinea languages they should use 
And the Netherlands is multi-culty, so that also isnât it!
PS: Makes sense when you provide info when asking for something like this. (Your language for exampleâŚ)
They are referring to the comments in blender\release\datafiles\locale\languages, although I do not know what âExplicitly forbidden!â is referring to. Most certainly the Blender project does not want to exclude anyone.
@mont29 Perhaps you can explain the reason behind this comment?
Romanian. It does have some special characters but I donât believe gettext has any issue with that. Besides, there are other languages already supported that have different characters set.
Also, there are no dialects. Itâs spoken in Romania and Moldavia but itâs the same language
The comments says # Explicitly forbidden! #20:Romanian (Român):ro_RO. I was just wondering why
Well,
I, mysel was working in Tonga, and when I left I gave all coding and security password stuff to my boss, with the words: Donât use special characters anywhere.
(Also told her if she does, I canât fix it, if I canât log in anymore, even after typing the exact letters on her keyboard again.)
She was working on an english machine/keyboard with an extension to use Tongan characters via option keys.
Guess who called me, 15min. after I left the building for the last time!!!
But weâll see why when the devs answer.
Do you know whether Blenderâs UI font (bfont?) supports the required special characters?
This file is only the âconfigâ file used by Blender to know which languages it can show.
Formulation could be better (will change it tomorrow), but this is just a marker in an auto-generated file to note that those languages have been skipped on purpose during i18n generation process (see settings.py ¡ rB). This happen mainly when some initial (empty) translation PO file was generated at some point because someone wanted to translate it, but no work was actually ever done on it.
That way, we keep generated files in the working SVN repository in case someone wants to pick them up, but we do not propose an empty translation in Blender UI.
Regarding special chars, Blender should integrate a vast majority of scripts nowadays, although complex ones (like Devanagari e.g.) are not properly composed yet. There is some work in progress towards that from @Harleya currently.
As of Blender 3.4 we have swapped out our single huge UI font for multiple fonts that work as a fallback stack. They should support the display of the majority of alphabets used in the world and all of the accents, tones, and combining characters needed for almost all languages. Adding new ones would be simple now too.
We donât currently have proper support for right-to-left languages and those that require âshapingâ, the replacement of glyphs depending on position and context. I am working on that but donât expect fast progress.