Content translation/Roadmap/2017–2018

Content Translation roadmap for fiscal year 2017–2018.

Migration to VisualEditor
Content Translation's editing component is being migrated from a plain contenteditable to VisualEditor. This is done in two major steps:
 * 1) Migration of the frontend components to OOJS UI, already ongoing. In addition to setting the stage for VE, this is also expected to fix major bugs with saving and loading and with paragraph alignment.
 * 2) Migration of the editing component itself, begins in the last quarter of fiscal year 2016–2017.

In addition to having a uniform editing environment, this is also supposed to make possible several often-requested features:
 * The same handling for various parsing errors.
 * Automatic detection of wiki text.
 * Adding categories, references, templates, formulas, etc., using the same controls as VE.

Target delivery time: July–September 2017.

Template handling improvements
The previous iteration was done in the latter half of 2016, and allowed adapting a much wider array of templates, including infoboxes. However, one important kind of template that is not yet supported well enough is ones inside references ("citations"). We also plan to improve CX’s template editor itself by allowing machine translation of template parameter values, and by fixing several outstanding bugs in it.

Target delivery time: October–December 2017.

Stabilization
General stabilization and preparation to take Content Translation out of beta status. Current list of important bugs can be found at the Content Translation non-beta Phabricator board, but it will likely be updated.

Target delivery time: January–March 2018.

Farther future directions

 * Translation List: A feature that will allow individuals and groups create list of articles to translate, and to track the translation progress. Research and design were already done, but implementation is being delayed until more urgent issues above are addressed.
 * Mobile translation: The previous iteration of exploring this can be found at Content translation/Product Definition/Mobile exploration, but a major new iteration of research, design, and development will be needed.