Last modified: 2012-09-27 01:10:58 UTC
Per the discussion on http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AAF#Ansprache_im_.E2.80.9EAchtung.2C_deine_Bearbeitung_geht_evtl._verloren.E2.80.9C-Feld (in German), the edit warning produced by the Vector skin, can only be partially translated via the message [[MediaWiki:Vector-editwarning-warning]]. The rest comes from somewhere else, I assume from the standard messages of one's browser. This, however, has disadvantages. The first one is that the message then can't be changed to the common conventions of the localizations. For example, in German, they use a formal form, whereas it's a long-time convention to use the unformal form. This then leads to inconsistencies. I'm sure there are also other languages where localization standards can't be met due to this. The second problem is that then sometimes multilingual messages appear. If I edit the English Wikipedia with my German browser and then leave the edit window with unsaved changes, then there's first a German warning, then an English one, and then again a German one. This is confusing and not really good. It should be completely in the wgContentLanguage of the wiki. The third thing is that wikis then can't completely customize this message if they want to. Thus, I think that all three parts of this message should be translateable over translatewiki, as with all the other messages, too.
As you allude to yourself, the first and last paragraph of this message are provided by the browser. This means it's always in the browser language regardless of the user's language preference in MediaWiki, and may differ between browsers. However, scripts cannot change this message, so there's nothing we can do here.
