Wikimedia Language engineering/Reports/2019/March

Monthly updates from the Wikimedia Language team about changes to internationalization and translation and other language support features. Names of people assumed to contribute as volunteers are in bold text.

Content Translation
Content Translation allows people to translate Wikipedia articles. Also check out out the newsletter and updates about version 2.


 * Support to inspect elements in the source article such as references, templates and other content with non visible information.
 * More reliable generation of the published content by avoiding useless divs and nowiki tags inside references to be generated.
 * Better support for galleries by showing the associated contextual tools, and correcting visual alignment for the new translation dialog language selector.
 * More scalable support for translation services by simplifying the default configuration, and prevention of translation errors with external services.
 * Better handling of translation contents by saving links reliably, dividing the content in sections without the "italic title" template to get in the way, avoid extra spaces to be added around headers and improved support for identifying and highlighting corresponding sentences.
 * Corrected regressions in transferring templates across languages which was not working after the integration of the new read-only mode and style glitches in the article title.
 * Improved testing environment by correcting fatal errors when logging-in in the beta cluster.
 * Cleaner representation of the source article by avoiding the input cursor to show for read-only content, and preventing links to wrongly show as red inside audio templates.
 * More clear statistics, by clarifying the information shown and the description of the output.
 * Completed the clean-up of the backlog of old translation drafts, allowing to automate the process next.
 * Cron script has been deployed to purge unused unpublished drafts older than 1 year and 3 months. It will run at every 15 days.
 * Better support for references by providing appropriate forms depending on the type of template they use.
 * More reliable navigation to the translation tile and the associated information by focusing the input in the title when navigating to issues related to it, and preventing the instructions card to disappear when completing the title edit.

Translate
Wikimedia's software is translated to hundreds of languages using the Translate extension for MediaWiki. In addition it is used to translate help pages, newsletters, policies, announcements, banners, etc. It is installed on Wikimedia special projects, translatewiki.net and many other sites. Translate is part of MLEB.


 * During translation hiding the priority language notice if target language is message documentation. (T217419)
 * Fixed page name suggestion dropdown not working on Special:PageMigration. (T217726)
 * Fixed a scenario where the message workflow status would appear when translating to the source language. (T217637)
 * Fixed broken Special:PageMigration due to errors from MessageCollection API. (T217727)
 * Added a link to Special:PageMigration after a page is marked for translation for the first time. (T178642)
 * Removed display of the workflow status for the source language / message group on the Stats page. (T160511)

And a bunch of other behind the scenes improvements. Please follow this link to see a full list of patches submitted to the extension.

Usage data

 * Translatable pages: Meta 4810 (+36); MediaWiki.org 4138 (+20); Commons 1145 (+198) [1][2][3]
 * Translate extension is installed on 207 (+0) wikis Wikiapiary

Universal Language Selector
Universal Language Selector provides language selector, list of suggested languages, input methods and web fonts. It is part of MLEB.



Other extensions
Babel (part of MLEB):



cldr (Common Locale Data Repository) (part of MLEB):



CleanChanges (part of MLEB):



LocalisationUpdate (part of MLEB):



TranslationNotifications:



MediaWiki core internationalization
Changes to translations and equivalent localisation data (magic words, namespace names) are not included in this list. The volunteer translators are updating translations every day to keep up with changes.



Project Milkshake
Project Milkshake consists of four re-usable jquery internationalization libraries.

jquery.i18n



jquery.uls



jquery.webfonts



jquery.ime


 * Amir Aharoni and Kartik Mistry cleaned up failing tests and switched to stylelint and eslint.
 * Amir Aharoni added New tilde-based layouts for several languages of Africa: Kabyle, Kabiye, Kikuyu, Luganda, Lingala, Malagasy, Northern Sotho, Koyraboro Senni, Sango, Sotho, Venda
 * Yuping Zuo added Latin Pinyin transliteration keyboard.



translatewiki.net
See also translatewiki.net news page.



Deployments and other site related updates




Cross team work/requirements

 * Work in progress to migrate cxserver service to Kubernetes with SRE.