Imagine the scenario - you run an international commercial multilingual website with content translated into several languages.  For the sake of this discussion lets say your site serves Europe, North and South America, Australia and New Zealand with content in English, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese.  Everything is going well until your marketing department comes to you and says they've been looking at the distributors page they want a different Spanish translation of a content item for Spain and Mexico, a different Portuguese version for Brazil and Portugal, a different German version for Germany and Austria, a different French version for Canada and France and even 4 different English versions for the UK, America, Australia and New Zealand.

You lock yourself away for hours, drinking far too much strong coffee and eventuall have a brainwave.  You realise you could create some pretend languages Austrian, Mexicanese, Brazilian, American etc.  That's all well and good until you realise you'll have to copy a lot of the German translations into Austrian , the Spanish Translations into Mexicanese etc. and all that work just to have different versions of a few specific items.

Well with Joomfish you no longer need to resort to such extreme remedies - you can use fallback languages.  So "how would you solve this problem using fallback language?" I hear you ask.  Lets take American English as an example:

1. Copy the Joomla language files e.g. copy languages/en-GB => languages/en-US and change any locale specific information or spelling
2. In the Joomfish language configuration page set en-GB as a fallback language for American English
   
3. "Translate" the regional distributor items into American English

Its as simple as that.

Now when a visitor specifies American as their language almost everything they see is from the original english version but when they go to the distributor page they see their regional content.

Combined with a multilingual aware menu system and you can use Joomfish to manage regional content very effectively even if its conent all in English!

Geraint