Language engineers improve translation tool and meet with their peers

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Quem não arrisca não petisca — a Portuguese proverb
During their latest development sprint, the Wikimedia Language Engineering team conducted extensive review and testing of the Translate extension, and participated and contributed to two major open source events in India: a core developers Language Summit and GNUnify.

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User experience improvements to the Translate tool will notably make it easier and more pleasant to translate content on Wikimedia sites that use it.

Translate Editor Updates

Progress continued on enhancements to the MediaWiki Translate extension. Further testing on the usability of the translation editor, search feature, and prototype of the advanced editing features were conducted by Pau Giner with five users from four different countries. The prototypes were tested in a great diversity of languages including Nepali, Chinese, Tetum, French, Breton, and Finnish. Based on this feedback, changes to the style and specifications for the prototype were made. Details about the individual tests can be found in the final report for this round of testing.

Community Participation

The Language Engineering team participated in the Open Source Language Summit and GNUnify, both held in Pune, India. The Open Source Language Summit, co-organized by the Wikimedia Foundation and Red Hat, consisted of work-sprints that focused on internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) features, font support, input method tools, language search, i18n testing methods and standards. More information about the event is available in the detailed event report.
The team also participated in GNUnify 2013, held at the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, in Pune. Besides presenting about the various projects that the team is currently working on, a translation sprint on translatewiki.net was also organized, as well as a workshop on jQuery.IME and a BoF session to discuss issues related to Wikimedia projects in Indian languages. Details of the accomplishments from the sessions at GNUnify 2013 can be found in the event report.

Other Achievements

Additionally, some changes to MediaWiki core were backported to support the newer version of the Universal Language Selector on MediaWiki versions 1.19 and 1.20. As there is no released maintenance version yet, MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB) users are advised to remain on MLEB version 2012.12.

Focus for the next sprint

For the next development sprint, the team will work on more features for the Translate extension, like the proofreading mode and further improving the user experience. In addition to this, focus will be on putting together the language coverage matrix as a reference for the status of language support on MediaWiki, MediaWiki Extensions and Wikimedia projects.
Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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