Fortuna i forti aiuta, e i timidi rifiuta — an Italian proverb

The Wikimedia Foundation and Red Hat jointly organized the Second Open Source Language Summit on February 12th and 13th, 2013. The summit was held at the Red Hat engineering center in Pune, India. Similar to the previous summit, this face-to-face work session was focused on internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) features, font support, input method tools, language search, i18n testing methods and standards. The sessions were work sprints, each with special focus on a key area. Participants included core contributors from the Wikimedia Foundation, Red Hat (including Fedora SIG members), KDE, FUEL, Google and C-DAC. Below is a summary of what was accomplished during these two days.

During the summit, teams from different organizations came together to discuss language-related challenges, and worked together on features and tools to address them.

Input Methods

Parag Nemade and Santhosh Thottingal worked on making additional input methods available for the jQuery.IME library. 60 input methods, covering languages like Assamese, Esperanto, Russian, Greek, Hebrew were added bringing the total to 144. Also IMEs from the m17n library missing from the jQuery.IME library were identified.

Translation tools, translatewiki.net & FUEL Sprint

Siebrand Mazeland and Niklas Laxström, together with Ankit Patel, Rajesh Ranjan and Red Hat language maintainers, worked to identify more tools that could be used as Translation aids in a translation system. The FUEL project aims to standardize translations for frequently used terms, translation style and assessment methodology. Until now it has focused mostly on languages of India. The FUEL project can now be translated in translatewiki.net. Pau Giner demonstrated new designs for the translation editor and terminology usage, remotely from Spain.

Language Coverage Matrix

To better evaluate the needs for enabling support for languages, a matrix detailing the requirements and availability of basic and extended features is being drawn up. With 285 languages currently supported in Wikimedia and more than 100 in Fedora, this document will be instrumental in bridging the gaps and porting features across projects and platforms. Key areas of evaluation include input methods, fonts, translation aids like glossaries and spell-checkers, testing and validation methods, etc. A preliminary draft was created during the summit by Alolita Sharma, Runa Bhattacharjee and Amir E. Aharoni.

Fonts, WebFonts

An initiative to document the technical aspects of fonts for scripts for languages spoken in India started during the language summit. For each of the scripts, a reference font will be chosen and each font will be explained in detail to intersect with the Open Type font specification as a standard. It will aim to act as a reference document for any typographer working on Indian language fonts. Initial draft and outline of this document was prepared during the second day of the language summit, mainly by Santhosh Thottingal and Pravin Satpute.

Testing Internationalization Tools

Finding suitable methods for testing internationalized components and contents was the major focus of this sprint, with the Fedora Localization Testing Group (FLTG) and Wikimedia’s Language Engineering team sharing details of their testing methods. The FLTG conducts Test Days prior to Fedora beta releases with a test matrix targeted at specific core components, and Wikimedia uses unit tests for frequent testing of their development features. The FLTG showed its plans to integrate the screenshot comparison method for testing localized interfaces. This method will be useful for Wikimedia too. Extending the method for web-based applications and Wikimedia’s language requirements (e.g. right-to-left) were identified as areas for collaboration.

More news from the Language Summit can be found in the tweets, the session notes and the full report.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

The Wikimedia Foundation and Red Hat co-organized an Open Source Language Summit in Pune, India on November 6-7, 2012. The summit focused on language tools and technology development to support languages on Wikipedia, the Web, Linux and other Open Source platforms.

Santhosh Thottingal presenting his talk on jquery.ime

In total, 45 core language technology developers, open source contributors, typographers and technology evangelists from the Wikimedia Language Engineering and Mobile teams, Red Hat, Mozilla Foundation, KDE, GNOME, translatewiki.net and other open source projects participated in sessions and work sprints on internationalization and localization features supporting various open source projects on the web and Linux. After brief introductory talks, we focused our work on font support, input method tools, language search, and web and localisation standards.

Highlights: 

The event had short talks on the following topics:

The following people won prizes for their code contributions during the event:

• Anish Patil ported Universal Language Selector’s cross-language search algorithm to gnome language search
• Aravinda VK wrote a set of font-forge python wrappers to make changes to fonts programmatically. Aravinda fixed a few bugs in Kannada Gubbi font for Harfbuzz rendering engine and also wrote Kannada KGP keymap for jquery.ime
• G Karunakar added Hindi inscript keyboard layout to Firefox OS GAIA

Other accomplishments included:

• Kushal Das added patches to deploy Universal Language Selector on http://www.mozilla.org and also a patch for a bug on Mozilla localization platform.
• Alolita, Sankarshan, Runa, Satish worked on discussing APIs for various translation workflows and putting together an initial specification.
• Rajeesh Nambiar, Hussain KH, Ani Peter, Praveen A and Pravin Satpute fixed and filed upstream bugs for Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati and Punjabi fonts with Harfbuzz.
• Parag Nemade added InScript2 keyboards for Sanskrit, Nepali, Marathi and Konkani to jquery.ime.
• Ankit Gadgil wrote over 200 unit tests for Marathi and Hindi input methods in jquery.ime.
• Yuvaraj Pandian, Pau Giner, Arun Ganesh and Siebrand Mazeland developed an initial version of an Android-native app for Translatewiki.net for translation reviews.
• Pau Giner conducted user testing with new translation prototypes with translators. Arun Ganesh created an icon for gnome-transliteration.

You can browse through tweets and more notes from the event. Happy reading!

Srikanth Lakshmanan
Internationalisation/Localisation Outreach / QA Engineer

The Language Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation works on a set of tasks every two weeks. This post is about the team’s accomplishment over the past two weeks. You can also check the slides of our demonstration.

jQuery.ime: Wikimedia wikis use Extension:Narayam to support input of non-Latin text. As part of Project Milkshake, jQuery.ime is a generic input method tool ported from Narayam, which can be used even outside the Wikimedia universe. We have completed the development of jQuery.ime and this example demonstrates the plugin in action. It supports over 60 input methods across 32 languages. There is detailed technical specification and we welcome you to try out and contribute to the project by creating new input methods or reporting bugs. The next phase will be to integrate jQuery.ime with Universal Language Selector.

Internationalization requirements for VisualEditor: The VisualEditor will change the Mediawiki editing interface in a major way, making it much more user friendly. The Language Engineering team has a keen interest in making sure the VisualEditor supports all languages. We have written detailed Internationationalization and Bidirectional text requirements for the Visual Editor to support all languages, including right to left languages. Other available documents are a general test document, right to left test and Indic tests for testing input method compatibility with VisualEditor. Do perform these tests for your language and report bugs if you find them.

India Events: The Language Engineering team will be in India in early November participating in the OpenSource Language Summit in Pune and the Wikimedia DevCamp in Bangalore. If you are a developer interested in working on language related tools or Wikimedia Mobile, please sign up for the DevCamp. We will also meet up with community and talk about Language Engineering tools at the Language Engineering meetups in Pune and Bangalore. If you’re near, please sign up and we’ll see you there!

In brief:

• Universal Language Selector got some bug fixes, including scrolling, choosing fonts, and it is now fully internationalized.
• As mentioned in the previous blogpost, We have completed integrating Extension:Translate with CentralNotice. Some patch sets are awaiting code review. Unfortunately this feature might be missing in this year’s fundraising translations, due to other fundraising priorities.
• We held IRC office hours (log) on October 17th. The next session is on November 21st.

Srikanth Lakshmanan

Internationalisation/Localisation Outreach / QA Engineer

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. :)