I have been looking for a tool to support my second native language but have found nothing since it is so rarely used. I see that my language is not available on LanguageTool, but that it can be added and I would like to be the one to develop it on here. I may need to extend my skills, but I am a data warehouse and BI developer so I believe I can manage.
What resources do I need to start out? Do I need to speak with somebody?
There are some socio-political complexities around the language’s multiple orthographies and I want to ensure I’m open and honest about what I’m developing and for whom.
Do I need to speak to a core member of LanguageTool staff before I begin?
Hi Reuben, the technical part is documented at Adding a new Language | dev.languagetool.org. We currently don’t add new languages to LT unless they are maintained, i.e. you should work in a fork and improve support for your language at least for 6 months before we consider adding it to the main branch (there’s no guarantee that this will happen). We’re willing to help with the technical part, but our time is limited…
I am in the process of following the instructions you’ve linked me to and getting set up.
Do you or your colleagues have any questions/thoughts around the socio-political issue of multiple orthographies, or shall I just go for it?
On/in books, the orthographies are labelled with their acronyms in brackets. Can I do that here to make it clear for users, or are language names assigned by looking up the ISO 639-1 code?
Great. I understand conceptually what that is doing and I think I can use it to do what I need to do. Time for to start digging in to understand all this better. Thank you very much