When you have a message, you use the appropriate language and tools to address multiple people. We do not use our eyes to see how many people we address and we do not use a bull horn to be heard. Our MediaWiki software knows the numbers involved and a plural enabled message will be formed according to the rules of the language.

When we implemented plural support for JavaScript, we checked our new implementation for plural with our implementation in PHP and we checked against the standard for such things, the CLDR.

The Localisation team does not know the language rules for the 280+ languages that have a Wikipedia. We prefer to implement what the standard tells us but we support more languages than the CLDR. We want to channel our need for support through “Language Support teams” and we want them to help us understand  and fix the inconsistencies and add the missing information to the CLDR.

Every two weeks a sprint and every week a deployment. The Localisation team aims to bring you new and updated functionality when we have it.

As you can see in the summary below, the focus this sprint has been very much on the Translate extension. Management of translations and the translation process is what we have worked on. When texts are translated in a Wiki, they often are only needed within a specific time frame; it is now possible to mark a text as no longer needing any effort. For many languages there are multiple people involved in the work flow for the creation of a document that is well written in translation. When they are to work well together, it helps when their work changes its state so that it is clear that for instance something has been proofread.

The person who manages the publication and distribution of a page needs work flow states to decide what more needs to be done and what is ready. To do this he can make use of states that already exist or define additional states. These states are available as local messages and are available for translation.

Translate extension features

• Message work flow states help translator translate, review and making ready for publication
• There is now a new message group for recent translations. This message group makes these states possible in translation
• Special:MyLanguage can now be used with language sub pages to be used as the default fall-back instead of providing an untranslated version
• Pages marked for translation can now be marked as “discouraged”. They will no longer show up in the usual places. This prevents translators from translating them needlessly.
• Added {{#translationdialog:title}} for creating a link to the translation dialogue

Translate bug fixes

• The flash of unstylized content effect is reduced
• Made the extension work without legacy JavaScript globals
• The summary row in Special:LanguageStats and Special:MessageGroupStats is no longer sorted with rest of the rows.
• Fixes to the sizing of the translation editor dialogue
• Fixed a fatal error that sometimes occured when translation page title used GRAMMAR and the page was viewed with English UI.

Miscelaneous changes

• Parserfunctions ifexist magic word Italian translation fixed to ‘ifexist’
• Narayam preference wording changes from disable to enable
• The WebFonts icon no longer overlaps with the menu text
• WebFonts preview allows you to preview a text with a font. You can download these freely licensed fonts to your system.
• GENDER and PLURAL support are now available for use in JavaScript.
• Consistence updates for grouppage-* messages, for LocalisationUpdate
• Fixing be-tarask grammar forms

Changes deployed last week

• WebFonts was deployed for the Bishnupria Manipuri language; it uses the Lohit Bengali font
• Support for gendered name spaces was deployed for the Russian wikis.

As always, you are welcome to have a look at our sprint backlog (user:guest password: guest) and bug us in bugzilla with whatever needs fixing.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

Just a heads-up –

Michael Dale is working on some cleanup of how the various JavaScript bits are loaded by the skins to centralize some of the currently horridly spread-out code and make it easier to integrate in a centralized loader so we can serve more JS together in a single compressed request.

Unless there’s a strong objection I’d be very happy for this to also include loading up the jQuery core library as a standard component.

The minified jQuery core is 19k gzipped, and can simplify other JS code significantly so we can likely chop down wikibits.js, mwsuggest.js, and the site-customized Common.js files by a large margin for a net savings.

If you’ve done browser-side JavaScript development without jQuery and wanted to kill yourself, I highly recommend you try jQuery — it’s sooooo nice. :)