Language tools/status

Last update on: 2013-01-monthly

2011-05-16
Alolita Sharma and Erik Möller are currently gathering requirements on this project with the help of possible customers, including the language committee.

2011-06-30
Alolita Sharma published two RfPs to assemble a dedicated team to tackle localization issues from a feature development and outreach perspective. She is currently reviewing applications and contracts.

2011-08-01
Alolita Sharma continued to assemble a team dedicated to localization, and to work on the project definition and priorities.

2011-08-31
Siebrand Mazeland, Niklas Laxström and Gerard Meijssen joined the project in August. Niklas focused on code review for MediaWiki 1.18 regarding internationalization issues; he also introduced more flexible language fallback sequences. Siebrand worked on the product roadmap for 2011-2012, and started to plan hackathons & localization sprints in India in November. The Kiwix offline app was added to translatewiki.net, where it can now be localized.

2011-09-30
Siebrand Mazeland created a list of initial Indic target languages (and their properties) to improve support in MediaWiki for India's 28 official languages. Roan Kattouw deployed the Babel extension and found issues in the Translate extension, which were fixed by Niklas Laxström. Niklas started to rewrite MediaWiki's logging system to better support internationalization. He also added real-time statistics on translation completion, fixed a number of i18n bugs and reviewed code. Santhosh Thottingal implemented interface changes in the Narayam extension (suggested by Trevor Parscal), which was deployed to select Wikimedia wikis. He fixed bugs and added features to the WebFonts extension, and researched new possible fonts and their license. Alolita Sharma continued to plan the India Hackathon with Siebrand, Santhosh, and the local India team. Last, the i18n/l10n team met in person in San Francisco in late September.

2011-10-31
Siebrand Mazeland and the rest of the team continued to plan their work using Mingle (credentials: guest/guest). Santhosh Thottingal added new features, and support for more languages, to the WebFonts extension, as well as new keyboard mappings and languages to the Narayam input method extension. Gerard Meijssen started to build language support teams focusing on localization and internationalization. A major achievement was the deployment of the Translate extension to meta-wiki, by Niklas Laxström and Sam Reed; it will be used to translate content pages, e.g. for the 2011 fundraiser. The localization team ended its first sprint as a team, and presented a development showcase.

2011-11-30
The code of the WebFonts extension was reviewed, and deployment is planned for December. The Narayam input methods extension now remembers the five last used schemes, and a basic version of message group workflows was implemented in the Translate extension. A major focus of the team in November was the India hackathon, during which a lot of work got done. New Narayam keyboard mappings were developed, and WebFonts were tested further.

2011-12-31
<section begin=2011-12-31/>The WebFonts extension was deployed to select Indic languages and projects, making it possible to read content in languages using non-Latin fonts without installing fonts manually. The deployment [//lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-December/056966.html uncovered bugs and issues] that were addressed by the team, like cross-site font loading. The team also improved the Narayam and Translate extensions, and the latter was enabled on mediawiki.org to facilitate the translation of software documentation (like the Help:Extension:WebFonts page).<section end=2011-12-31/>

2012-01-31
<section begin=2012-01-31/>January 2012 was slow on the code production side because of the code slush preparing for the branching of MediaWiki 1.19. The Localization team invested a lot of time in writing user documentation for translation tools, input methods and web fonts. Thanks go in particular to the volunteers that assisted in writing and proofreading the documentation. Much of the user documentation can be translated using the Translate extension. Amir worked to solve the old bug in the EasyTimeline extension, that prevented it from working with Indic and right-to-left scripts. Another focus was to improve test coverage for WebFonts and Narayam. In February we expect to deliver further improvements for the translation process, notably on Meta, with workflow improvements, the introduction of a translation memory and (subject to delay) notifying translators of newly available translations from inside MediaWiki by e-mail.<section end=2012-01-31/>

2012-02-29
<section begin=2012-02-29/>The team is currently in the middle of a Translate extension sprint. They added new translation admin features, and are trying to get translation memory (TMX) ready for deployment to Wikimedia sites. Santhosh Thottingal used the  library to compress some WebFonts even more. The team also deployed WebFonts on the English Wikisource. The team will be moved to the Experimentation & Internationalization team going forward.<section end=2012-02-29/>

2012-03-31
<section begin=2012-03-31/>The team started to develop (with UI/UX contractors) the UI for a Universal language selector for desktop and mobile. They also added keymaps for language support to Narayam, added Lohit font updates from upstream to WebFonts, fixed bugs, reviewed code for localization support in MediaWiki 1.19, and discussed language support metrics. Niklas Laxström migrated the Translatewiki.net workflow to reflect the move to git/gerrit.<section end=2012-03-31/>

2012-04
<section begin=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. <section end=2012-04-monthly/>

2012-05
<section begin=2012-05-monthly/>The team continued integrating the first round of UI design for the Universal Language Selector (ULS) for desktop and mobile browsers. The prototype to showcase the first version of ULS was completed and demonstrated. The team completed development and deployed enhancements to the Translate extension with notification support, added more language support to the Narayam extension, fixed bugs, reviewed code for i18n support in Mediawiki, and completed a first draft for language impact metrics. The team also participated in IRC office hours with the community.<section end=2012-05-monthly/>

2012-06
<section begin=2012-06-monthly/>In June, the team:
 * Completed initial UI design and user experience testing for the Universal Language Selector (ULS)
 * Developing initial prototype for the Universal Language Selector (ULS)
 * Developed and deployed Translation Notifications
 * Added more language input methods to Narayam
 * Added more language script fonts to Web Fonts
 * Made progress on integration of Translate functionality on meta for communications and fundraising groups (with integration into CentralNotice)
 * Started work with Arabic community to increase Arabic language support into i18n/L10n tools<section end=2012-06-monthly/>

2012-07
<section begin=2012-07-monthly/>The team continued to work on the Universal Language Selector and set up a prototype to test it. Development was completed on Translation memory and CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) plurals support and code review is pending. User experience testing of the Translate extension is in progress to Translate UX enhancements. The WebFonts and Narayam extensions were deployed on Bengali Wikisource and Punjabi Wikipedia. Development started on Project Milkshake.<section end=2012-07-monthly/>

2012-08
<section begin=2012-08-monthly/>The team continued to work on the Universal Language Selector (ULS): the display settings dialog was completed and is now able to show and set WebFonts, similarly to the WebFonts extension which will be phased out once the ULS is deployed. The lists of languages were tweaked to emphasize those likely to be chosen by the user, based on their location and past selections. Translation memory was deployed on all Wikimedia sites using the Translate extension, and CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) plurals support was merged into the core master. User experience testing of the Translate extension is in progress. Initial analysis for i18n metrics was also completed and published. The team conducted its monthly office hours, a bug triage and development showcase.<section end="2012-08-monthly"/>

2012-09-monthly
<section begin="2012-09-monthly"/>The team formerly known as the "Localisation team" has been rebranded to "Language Engineering team". The goal of this name change is to communicate its goals more easily, and we were of the opinion that terminology like internationalization and localisation does not illustrate this clearly enough to those not in the know.<section end="2012-09-monthly"/>

2012-11-monthly
<section begin="2012-11-monthly"/>In November 2012, the Language Engineering team travelled to India for 10 days together with the Mobile team for 6 events in total: the two-day Language Summit at the Red Hat offices in Pune, a Language Engineering Community Meetup in Pune, the three-day DevCamp 2012 Bangalore, a Language Engineering Community Meetup in Bangalore, a presentation by Erik Moeller on the current state of tech in the Wikimedia Foundation, and Coffee with Arky, a meetup of Mozilla users.

The rest of the month, development time was spent on completing the Universal Language Selector, and getting it to a state where it could be put in maintenance mode for a few months. In April 2013, phase two of the ULS will start, will consist of adding content language selection.

The Language Engineering designers completed the design for the Translation UX project, for which development has commenced end of November, and will continue for 8 sprints of a fortnight, until mid-March 2013.<section end="2012-11-monthly"/>

2012-12-monthly
<section begin="2012-12-monthly"/>Development of the new user interface for Translate, as well as the translation editor functionality, continued at full pace throughout the month of December, with iterative feature development and user experience improvements. Santhosh Thottingal and Niklas Laxström are leading development and Pau Giner is focusing on optimizing user experience elements. The team also released the latest version of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle. Increased support for language variants, alternate language codes were added to the Universal Language Selector. Alolita Sharma continued to work with Red Hat's localization and internationalization teams to evaluate localization data, translation tools and internationalization tools and technologies.<section end="2012-12-monthly"/>

2013-01-monthly
<section begin="2013-01-monthly"/>Development of the new user interface for Translate, as well as the translation editor functionality, continued throughout the month of January. Focus was on backend work and extending the WebAPI to support the remaining features which are needed to reach feature parity with current editor. MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle 2013.01 was released. Universal Language Selector was deployed with limited features to selected WMF projects using Translate extension.

The Language Engineering (i18n/l10n) achievements this month include progress on
 * Translate UI enhancements. Development continues full steam ahead. Integration tasks continue on the Translate infrastructure including Solr as well as translation aids.
 * The team also added another member to its fold - welcoming long time open source contributor Runa Bhattacharjee as the team's engineering outreach and QA coordinator.
 * Open source collaboration and community outreach activities include the team's upcoming participation in the bi-annual Open Source Language Summit in Pune, FOSDEM and GNUnify.
 * Collaboration projects also continue with Red Hat's language technologies teams with an upcoming work sprint to complete several projects extending i18n support for Indic languages.
 * Language Coverage Matrix: This project is now taking off with Runa taking the lead to compile a snapshot of our i18n tools coverage per language for 300 languages in the Wikimedia universe.<section end="2013-01-monthly"/>