Internationalization and localization tools

WMF engineering activity

Internationalization and localization tools

A set of tools to facilitate editing in languages using a non-Roman alphabet.

Group:	Features
Start:	2011-08
End:
Management:	Alolita Sharma
Team:	Siebrand Mazeland, Niklas Laxström, Gerard Meijssen, Santhosh Thottingal, Amir Aharoni

• [edit status] • [add new]
  2012-04-monthly: The team has completed the first round of UI designs for a Universal Language Selector (ULS) for desktop and mobile. UI/UX team members (Pau Giner and Arun Ganesh) are now implementing a prototype to showcase the first version of ULS. The team also added keymaps for language support to Narayam, added notification support to Translate, fixed bugs, reviewed code for localization support in MediaWiki 1.19, and discussed language support metrics.

Rationale

If you can't type in your language, or if your operating system doesn't natively have the ability to display your language on the web, you are impeded from reading or editing Wikimedia projects. As Wikimedia reaches into strategic priority regions like India, ensuring that we eliminate all barriers to access and participation is escalating in priority.

Key deliverables

Deliverables of this project will likely include:

• Consistent support for web fonts as needed, building on the web fonts extension
• Consistent availability of input methods for all supported languages in any Wikimedia projects (e.g. it should be possible to type in Hindi on the English Wikipedia), building on the Narayam extension
• Support for new input methods (including potentially on-screen keyboards) and new character sets
• Porting/implementing relevant support on mobile devices
• Improvement of RTL support, especially in a bidirectional context
• Resolution of other critical issues, e.g. resolve encoding conflicts with search engines

Timeline

• The team formed in July/August 2011, at which point requirements gathering, prioritization and development began to officially kick off.

Additional documents

• User requirements:
  • Internationalization and localization tools/Requirements/Indic language support
• Specifications:
• Software design document:
• Test plan:
• Documentation plan:
• User interface design docs:
• Schedule:
• Task management:
• Release management plan:
• Communications plan:
• Status updates

Communications

• Kiwix localisation is supported at translatewiki.net, Gerard Meijssen, Wikimedia blog, August 20th, 2011.
• The Localisation team brings you input methods, Gerard Meijssen, Wikimedia blog, September 15, 2011.
• Babel extension live on the WMF projects, Gerard Meijssen, Wikimedia blog, September 21st, 2011