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

The Language Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation works on a new set of tasks every two weeks. The following describes the work we have done over the past month.

Language Engineering Team: We have renamed our team from “Internationalization & localization” to “Language Engineering”. The terminology we previously used did not illustrate our goals very clearly. We hope that the new name will communicate our goals and activities better.

Translating Central Notices: The process of translating banner texts for CentralNotice (used for Wikimedia banners) will soon be more streamlined,  after the integration with the Translate extension. It is now possible to create message groups for translation from CentralNotice. We are completing a few pending tasks before making this tool available on Wikimedia projects.

Partially translated Tamil Interface of the Universal Language Selector.

Universal Language Selector: The jquery component of Universal Language Selector (ULS) is now internationalized and can be translated. This also fixes the ‘placeholder’ that some of our readers mentioned in comments on our previous posts. ULS also got many bug fixes, including proper input tool support and improved workflow between the settings screens. We are discussing with the Operations team on how to deploy ULS on small Wikimedia wikis without negatively impacting current caching mechanisms for anonymous users.

Project Milkshake: We fixed bugs, fixed tests and addressed review comments related to jquery.i18n, the internationalization library. jquery.uls, a library for language selection, is the latest addition to Milkshake.

San Francisco Meetings: Most of the language engineering team members were in San Francisco in September. We met with other Engineering teams at the Wikimedia Foundation, including the Visual Editor team, and discussed Internationalization requirements with the Mobile team. We talked about Making the Web Multilingual with Wikipedia (video) at San Francisco State University, and presented Project Milkshake at Google, Twitter and change.org.

Other news

• We held IRC office hours (log) on September 19th, and will be holding the next session on October 17th.
• We will be in Bangalore in November for the Wikimedia Devcamp.

The Internationalisation/Localisation (i18n/l10n) 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 watch the 15 minute demonstration and check the slides.

Language Teams
Mediawiki supports over 350 languages. Supporting languages goes far beyond providing a localised interface. It includes ensuring that the overall experience of a language in which the user reads and contributes to Wikipedia (or any wiki running MediaWiki) is the same as it is to an English user. It is impossible to support without the help of volunteers in the respective languages. We have tried filling this gap through Language Support Teams. We are now starting an initiative to form and build strong language teams and have published a detailed plan. Please do let us know what you think about it.

Translation Memory on Wikimedia servers

The Translate extension is currently deployed on Meta-Wiki, mediawiki.org and a few other Wikimedia wikis to facilitate the translation of their content. In order to make translations faster and more consistent, a shared translation memory service has been enabled in the extension, which will provide translation suggestions from past translations of similar text.

Universal Language Selector Update

ULS with Common languages based on geolocation and “accept languages” listed

The Universal Language Selector (ULS) has a new top section in the default view. It now lists a set of “Common Languages”. They include languages spoken in your region (determined by geolocation), preferred languages from your browser (“Accept-Language”) and previously used languages. For many users, this should minimise the need to search for their language of choice in the list. The ULS now integrates with MediaWiki preferences, and performance was improved by using lazy loading.

Milkshake Update

jQuery.i18n, the internationalisation messaging framework library, saw the addition of support for gender, plural and grammar. All the language-specific rules that exist in Mediawiki are now available in jQuery.i18n. The framework is also built with scope for adding more extensible attributes in addition to the default ones. It supports lazy loading of translations.

Other accomplishments

• Translation UX tests continued, and led to improvemenents of the design prototypes for the translate extension, including new translator captchas. You can watch a short video about the project.
• We investigated solutions to support Indic languages on mobile platforms.
• We organized a bug triage on i18n issues.
• Apart from the usual bug fixes, a lot of Right-to-Left bugs were also fixed in the experimental PageTriage and ArticleFeedback v5 extensions, as well as in the veteran WikiHiero extension and core MediaWiki.

Srikanth Lakshmanan
Internationalisation/Localisation Outreach / QA Engineer

The Internationalisation/Localisation (i18n/l10n) team at the Wikimedia Foundation works on a set of tasks every two weeks. The following describes the work we’ve done over the past month.

We’ve worked on making the Universal Language Selector (ULS) functional according to the design prototypes, and it is now available for alpha testing on http://translatewiki.net. Please help us test it in your language. The features listed below are the highlights from the development work done on the ULS:

• Supporting approximate search, which will give results even with typos in it.
• Ability to do language search using any language: Search using the translation of language names in other language names.
• Auto-complete for search across languages.
• Writing systems that belong to the same family are visually grouped together.

Languages are grouped by writing system.

Fuzzy search: Searching 'tail' returns 'Thai' and 'Tamil'.

Another focus of our work has been Project Milkshake, an effort to release our existing internationalisation-related JavaScript components as standard jQuery libraries. These libraries —dually licensed under GPL and MIT license— will not only help us in integrating our tools better with the Universal Language Selector, but will also let other people reuse them widely in other web projects, and get the benefits of internationalisation components just by using these libraries:

• jquery.i18n — A library to provide full i18n framework that supports parameter replacements and grammar-, plural-, and gender-dependent translations;
• jquery.webfonts — A library to provide webfonts support, developed from WebFonts extension;
• jquery.ime —A library to provide input methods in the browser, developed from Narayam extension;
• jquery.uls will also be available soon as we make more progress on ULS.

We continued to improve translation user experience by making the screens more user-friendly and making the process more efficient for translators. We are currently working on the prototypes. This aims to increase the number of translators, as well as provide an interface that helps them spend their time as efficiently as possible. In the coming weeks, we will perform in-depth usability tests with several members of the community. You can learn more about them at the Translation UX page and, if you are interested, consider volunteering to participate in the usability tests.

As usual, apart from these, we continued fixing issues that were reported in Bugzilla, as well as translation-related issues in translatewiki.net. Narayam, the input tool, was deployed in Bengali Wikisource. If you need Narayam / WebFonts enabled on your wiki, please open a bug in bugzilla.

In the coming weeks, we will be working on integrating Narayam and WebFonts as part of language tools in Universal Language Selector, completing the translation UX improvements.

We will also be having our monthly online office hours on August 15 16:30 UTC (8:30 PDT). This is an opportunity to ask the development team questions about current and upcoming i18n features. The team will also share updates on exciting work happening on the ULS, translation workflow enhancements and additional language support on Narayam and Webfonts.

Please feel free to contact us through the mediawiki-i18n mailing list.

Srikanth Lakshmanan, Internationalisation/Localisation Outreach / QA Engineer