Arabic Language/Joomla! Languages Compatibility

Hi there,

We have an English/Arabic website and have recently installed your great plugin.

Slight problem is that FB XML Languages state Arabic support is ar_AR unicode, whereas our Joomla! version had many Arabic locales, of which we chose the most relevant, ar_SA (Saudi Arabian Arabic). We use JoomFish as our translation tool (links below). Joomla version is 1.5.23.

The problem is not the different Like/Comment rendering when the language changes, we know this happens and that's OK - it's more that the language settings prevent the facebook social items from rendering. We also use AddThis page tracking, but have tested with and without this and while it changes the AddThis results, it still has no impact on the language rendering.

An example can be seen here: www.triplew.me/en/samsunggalaxynote/faisal-hashmi#.T1Rn1PHxr_I (English)
Arabic: www.triplew.me/ar/samsunggalaxynote/faisal-hashmi#.T1RoXPHxr_I

When we force the Locale Override it works fine, but then it keeps the language that on the English site. Our case is unique because facebook's unicode ar_AR isn't available as a language pack on Joomla.

Questions:
1. Is it possible to force a Locale override for a specific language? e.g is there some code we can add to force the Locale meta tag only when in Arabic?
2. Do you have a Content Element for JoomFish? This may help this all-together.

Or any other solutions.

Thanks in advance - great component.

The problem is the language that JoomFish is setting your site to use is not one that Facebook supports. If you go to the Configuration - Facebook API tab in JFBConnect, you can specify the language that JFBConnect should use. Unfortunately though, if you hard-code it here, it won't translate automatically based on the user or site's language.

digitalapemedia wrote: 1. Is it possible to force a Locale override for a specific language? e.g is there some code we can add to force the Locale meta tag only when in Arabic?

If you can configure JoomFish to use different languages, that would be better. In the Facebook API tab, there's a link to an XML file that shows all the languages Facebook supports.
Maybe a good idea (and workaround) here would be to keep the ar_SA Joomla Language files, but change them to be ar_AR. this way, FB will recognize the language of the website.

digitalapemedia wrote: 2. Do you have a Content Element for JoomFish? This may help this all-together.

The is currently no Content Element for JoomFish, since JFBC itself does not store any website content.
we will look into that to see if there is a more elegant solution.



please let us know if the workaround suggested above worked.

Mati

Hi MTK,

Thanks for the quick response.

We have been working on it today, the suggested workaround obviously impacts substantially the DB tables of which many other translations and active objects rely on that language string as a native Joomla Language.

Do you have any other solutions that we can employ to get the standard Joomla! language to render to the right FB language?

For instance, is there any Javascript that can be placed in the source files where it does a check on the Joomla Lang and adopt that as a localisation? So this would essentially change the language in the plugin to render the page language - ar_SA to ar_AR (maybe around the $lang = JFactory::getLanguage()) area that could use an IF Statement, like... IF Lang = ar_SA.... change it to ar_AR).

Thanks!

Hello,
unfortunately there is no quick fix for this, cause as you mentioned the language you are using is not in the list of supported languages.

using a JS to change the language 'on the fly' does not exists, and even if it had exists it would do the same I suggested to do manually.
Joomla keeps most of its language settings on the ini/xml files, so changing it properly should not harm the DB.
the problem here is JoomFish, which does store its data on the DB, but the language configuration setting should be pretty easy to figure out.

we suggest you give it another try, and see if that works out for you.

Mati