The names of special pages historically have been translated using a PHP file. Its proposed that we move to a translatewiki-based approach using JSON files.
The current setup poses problems for code maintainers as engineers are often merging code that contains translated strings of languages they do not understand and translators are required to understand basic PHP syntax. In addition to this, these files do not enjoy the same extent of translation that the translatewiki-based translations do. For example, the Special:Nearby page has 45 translations in alias file, whereas the exact same string inside the i18n folder for mobile-frontend-nearby-title message enjoys 148 unique translations via translatewiki. Let’s pay off this technical debt and improve translations for our projects.
It's proposed that we update the localization cache to read messages that begin with 'special-page-alias-', and where the suffix matches an existing canoncial special page name
for example
```
$specialPageAliases['he'] = [
'MobileOptions' => [ 'הגדרות_נייד', 'הגדרות_פלאפון', 'הגדרות_סלולרי' ],
]
```
would be replaced by:
he.json
```
{
"specialPageAliases": {
"he": {
"MobileOptions": [
"הגדרות_נייד",
"הגדרות_פלאפון",
"הגדרות_סלולרי"
]
}
}
```