What is the meaning of -{ }- in MediaWiki wikitext?

In my MediaWi开发者_Python百科ki wiki, any wikitext containing -{ }- is not parsed correctly. Do I need some extension?

Example:

-{Computer}-

---

The -{}- syntax is used by the rather poorly documented (but widely used, at least in some regions!) MediaWiki automatic language variant conversion feature (LanguageConverter), which converts text between different writing systems and local variants of a language, such as between simplified and tradition Chinese characters, or between Cyrillic and Latin alphabets in Serbian language.

Specifically, -{}- is used to manually override the automatic conversion, either for literal text (such as names or quotations) that should not be converted, or for special cases where the automatic conversion gets it wrong and needs to be overridden. The syntax for the latter case looks something like -{var1: Some text; var2: Something else}-, possibly with some flags at the beginning that change the behavior in various ways.

Alas, short of reading the code itself, I was unable to find any comprehensive documentation on what all these flags and such actually do. I do believe that there's some decent documentation available if you can read Chinese, but I can't, and the output of Google Translate leaves much to be desired.