Wikimedia Language engineering/Reports/2018/October

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.


 * Improved performance by prefetching requests to translation services in advance to deliver results immediately when users add a new paragraph, caching of API requests and an optimization of the caching system.
 * More reliable saving process by retrying with an increased timeout after initial failure.
 * More solid approach to divide the content into sections for the tool to handle, and preventing errors when adding sections to the translation.
 * Improved support for inserting media, preventing the media dialog to block the article.
 * Better support for references solving issues when editing references and displaying them.
 * Improved control for excessive unmodified content by excluding types of content where the warning is not relevant in order to prevent false positives.
 * Better support for red links, generating as red links only for the missing articles the user confirmed, and avoid rendering them as regular links in the source document.
 * Better guidance by delaying content warnings only while the user is editing but showing previous warnings immediately when a translation is resumed.
 * Improved alignment on RTL languages and a cleaner source article by avoiding noise characters showing from Visual Editor elements.
 * More solid control of anonymous access by gracefully handling access errors.
 * More reliable saving and recovering process to persist the contents when user switches between translation services, and avoid moving translations to in-progress when there are no further changes since they were published.
 * Better guidance by communicating when templates could not be adapted.
 * Better mapping references across languages by using Citoid metadata when mapping template parameters, avoiding issues with empty references and partially adapted ones.
 * More effective integration with translation services by sending a more compact version of the content HTML to prevent exceeding the translation limits, improving efficiency and security. A regression in this area was also fixed.
 * Facilitate the access to the new version by creating an outreach campaign link to be used in interactions with Wikipedia communities.
 * Instrumentation improvements to better measure the issues translators experience.
 * More reliable application of machine translation by avoiding quick manual modifications to be counted as machine translation, improving support for quote templates by avoiding blank text blocks to be sent for translation, avoid the adaptation of transclusion fragments, improved logging for Apertium, and better handling of templates and link attributes.
 * More reliable visual alignment of paragraphs between original and translated content.



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.



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

translatewiki.net
See also translatewiki.net news page.