The Wikimedia Language Engineering team, along with Red Hat, organised the Fall edition of the Open Source Language Summit in Pune, India on November 18 and 19, 2013.
Members from the Language Engineering, Mobile, VisualEditor, and Design teams of the Wikimedia Foundation joined participants from Red Hat, Google, Adobe, Microsoft Research, Indic language projects, Open Source Projects (Fedora, Debian) and Wikipedians from various Indian languages. Google Summer of Code interns for Wikimedia Language projects were also present. The 2-day event was organised as work-sessions, focussed on fonts, input tools, content translation and language support on desktop, web and mobile platforms.
The Fontbook project, started during the Language Summit earlier this year, was marked to be extended to 8 more Indian languages. The project aims to create a technical specification for Indic fonts based upon the Open Type v 1.6 specifications. Pravin Satpute and Sneha Kore of Red Hat presented their work for the next version of the Lohit font-family based upon the same specification, using Harfbuzz-ng. It is expected that this effort will complement the expected accomplishment of the Fontbook project.
The other font sessions included a walkthrough of the Autonym font created by Santhosh Thottingal, a Q&A session by Behdad Esfahbod about the state of Indic font rendering through Harfbuzz-ng, and a session to package webfonts for Debian and Fedora for native support. Learn more about the font sessions.
Improving the input tools for multilingual input on the VisualEditor was extensively discussed. David Chan walked through the event logger system built for capturing IME input events, which is being used as an automated IME testing framework available at http://tinyurl.com/imelog to build a library of similar events across IMEs, OSs and languages.
Santhosh Thottingal stepped through several tough use cases of handling multilingual input, to support the VisualEditorâs inherent need to provide non-native support for handling language content blocks within the contentEditable surface. Wikipedians from various Indic languages also provided their inputs. On-screen keyboards, mobile input methods like LiteratIM and predictive typing methods like ibus-typing-booster (available for Fedora) were also discussed. Read more about the input method sessions.
The Language Coverage Matrix Dashboard that displays language support status for all languages in Wikimedia projects was showcased. The Fedora Internationalization team, who currently provides resources for fewer languages than the Wikimedia projects, will identify the gap using the LCMD data and assess the resources that can be leveraged for enhancing the support on Desktops. Dr. Kalika Bali from Microsoft Research Labs presented on leveraging content translation platforms for Indian languages and highlighted that for Indic languages MT could be improved significantly by using web-scale content like Wikipedia.
Learn more about the sessions, accomplishments and next steps for these projects from the Event Report.
Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation
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