Thanks Leinad, You're right this is something that we really want to do and have had on the list. I'll also pass it on to the translation team so that we can at least do it manually for now.

These two are fixed manually right now. I agree that CN should use fallback languages, though, so it's a larger issue than just that.

CentralNotice does use fallback languages (if they are available). What banner are you looking at?

See for instance this: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/?uselang=inh

It should fall back to Russian (which has a translation), firstly because that is the fallback language for inh, secondly because that is the wiki language. Instead it falls back to English.

When I think of it however, this is not really a CN issue, but an even larger issue of how {{int:...}} messages are handled [1]. As such I believe this is a duplicate of another bug, but I cannot find it. Possibly bug 1495.

Anyways, changing to product "MediaWiki" and component "Internationalization"; please revert that if I am incorrect. Also, I believe bug 26342 is another variant of this bigger issue.

[1] At least that's how we handle messages for the fundraiser banners; however, when it comes to banners that have the translation in that banner this might be a separate bug.

Ah, OK. I see what's going on. They aren't using CentralNotice's banner translation system but are using int messages instead. Thus the fallback languages aren't working. I imagine they're doing this so they don't have to re-enter the translations for multiple banners that use the same text. I'm going to retitle this bug to something more specific...

Yup, you're right. CN's native system for handling fallback languages seems to work fine, so the retitle is a good explanation of the real issue at hand.