Localisation team sprint 5 update

With a new sprint, new functionality for MediaWiki is identified to be deployed in two weeks time. There is room for dealing with issues to do with Narayam and WebFonts. Many of the new activities have to do with documentation, translation and feedback.

What we hope for is that the feedback functionality that is now part of MediaWiki can be used to ask for feedback of MediaWiki features. It is obvious that the Wikimedia Localisation team cannot support all the 300+ languages that have their projects or exist in the incubator. What we can do is process the information we get from our language support teams. Figuring out how to do this is one of the goals for this sprint.
The use of Narayam and WebFonts will be helped a lot with documentation; “where to find that character on this keyboard mapping” or “what does an international keyboard look like” are questions looking for an answer. Determining how to document and what to translate is not all that obvious. With keyboard maps and fonts distributed as part of MediaWiki documenting on “the” wiki does not scale to other Wikimedia wikis and, MediaWiki wikis outside the Wikimedia Foundation are as much in need of documentation. When people start using MediaWiki because of such language support features we accomplish real support for a language.
For this sprint, these questions are looking for an answer and in the mean time the Translate extension will gain these new features:

• Documents that need translation can be grouped together; for instance all the Fundraiser messages or Wikimedia reports
• Documents can be marked as no longer needing translation
• Changes to the state of documents and translations will be logged and the log will be available for viewing
• Depending on the state of a document or a translation, attention can be drawn when there is a need for activity

User documentation needs translation and hopefully many of the algorithms used for the localisation of MediaWiki at translatewiki.net will equally apply for user documentation. Life will become a lot easier for all those people who administer MediaWiki and have only a basic understanding of English. We hope to deliver this in one of our future sprints.
Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant