How to go about unsupported (or undesired?) languages?

[juliancoffee]

So, at some point in time, we got an MR for adding a Taiwanese variant of Traditional Chinese, zh-Hant-TW, and because we usually don't turn away contributions, we decided to merge it.

Soon after that, we discovered that we can't add Taiwanese Chinese in Weblate, but we decided to do it anyway, just by keeping it in on our Gitlab and ignoring Weblate for Taiwanese.
Except this didn't work either, because it seems that Weblate recognises Taiwanese ... except it recognises it as ... Traditional Chinese.
And so now we have some side effects because of it:

• Automatic actions like deleting unused keys apply to both zh-Hant-TW and zh-Hant. Not terrible, just surprising.
• Doing pretty much anything (for example, renaming the component) triggers a validation check about the component contains several translation files mapped to a single language in Weblate.

Diagnostic recommendation is:

Please fix this by removing one of the translation files.

Is there any other way?
I tried language filter (https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-5.11.4/admin/projects.html#component-language-regex), but it's far from ideal, and also doesn't seem to do what I want it to do.

The current filter we're using is ^(?!(zh-Hant)$).+$, but first, as you might notice, it filters out zh-Hant, not zh-Hant-TW, because zh-Hant-TW didn't seem to do anything (or maybe I just doing it wrong), but also even ^(?!(zh-Hant)$).+$ doesn't seem to make the problem go away.
For some files, it fixes the problem, but then for other ones, the alert is still there, even if it passes the validation check and I can update the component (at least I can rename it now).
And the last problem is rather annoying than blocking is that I need to do it for every component individually and we have quite a lot of components. I tried to update settings for the "main" component, which all others link to, but it didn't solve anything.

[nijel]

Currently, Weblate considers zh-Hant-TW and zh-Hant to be the same languages. This is because Traditional Chinese is mostly used on Taiwan, so there is usually no need to differentiate these. It makes more sense to have just zh-Hant which is then used for Taiwan and add variants for actually differing dialects such as zh-Hant-HK.

You can avoid this by manually creating zh-Hant-TW language in Weblate.

See also https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/admin/languages.html#new-translations

[juliancoffee]

You can avoid this by manually creating zh-Hant-TW language in Weblate.

I couldn't find settings for it. Is it something that can be done by project admins or only by site admins?

[nijel]

Site admins can add languages at /languages/.

[juliancoffee]

Thanks! I think we tried to do that in the past, but failed. I guess it wouldn't hurt to try again. I'll come back with the results :)

[juliancoffee]

Meanwhile, I tried to do that locally.

Well, it fixes the issue with not being able to update the files, but it's not appearing in the language list for the project. I assume that's because it's shadowed by zh-Hant specifying it as an alias.

It's not yet clear how Weblate will treat the source folder, especially in combination with #15148, but I guess it's something.

[juliancoffee]

Ok, after doing a Rescan in repository management settings, it seems to pick it up, so I'll probably mark that as accepted.