Language tools

From mediawiki.org

The Language team has the goal of reducing the language barrier that users face when accessing or sharing knowledge. The team has created tools to facilitate the participation of our users regardless of their language. These include the creation of multilingual content and software, facilitate language navigation, and support for easy input and proper display of different scripts. Language tools and their infrastructures need regular maintenance and update efforts. Making our language tools and infrastructure work better helps all the projects that rely on them, and saves time and efforts to the people participating in them, from developers to translators and the final users.

In July 2018, an effort was started to identify key areas to improve in our language tools during the upcoming months. The affected tools, the plan and the status updates are described next.

List of tools[edit]

Language tools are listed below:

  • Translate extension . The infrastructure used to translate our software and multilingual pages. Communities of translators use it on Translatewiki.net and Wikimedia Meta-wiki.
  • Universal Language selector . Provides easy access to language settings, and facilitates language selection in different contexts including interlanguage links .
  • Project Milkshake. Developer libraries for internationalisation support on the web including input methods, web-fonts, and grammatical rules for languages that can be used on both Wikimedia and external projects.
  • MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle . A collection of selected MediaWiki extensions needed by any wiki which desires to be multilingual.
  • Content Translation . The tool to facilitate translation of Wikipedia articles across languages. Since it is in active development, the progress of this tool won't be tracked as part of the current maintenance effort, but as part of its own project page for the new version .
  • MinT. A machine translation service based on open source neural machine translation models released by other organizations with an open source license. Since it is in active development, the progress of this tool won't be tracked as part of the current maintenance effort, but on its own project page.

Maintenance plan[edit]

Since there is a wide catalog of language tools and potential areas to improve, we are keeping a list of current maintenance responsibilities and levels in our team Phabricator page.

Status updates[edit]

February 2024[edit]

January 2024[edit]

December 2023[edit]

November 2023[edit]

October 2023[edit]

September 2023[edit]

August 2023[edit]

July 2023[edit]

June 2023[edit]

May 2023[edit]

April 2023[edit]

March 2023[edit]

February 2023[edit]

January 2023[edit]

December 2022[edit]

November 2022[edit]

October 2022[edit]

September 2022[edit]

  • Disabled machine translation suggestions from Apertium for some language pairs in the Translate extension based on user requests.
  • Explored options on how to improve the performance of Special:PageTranslation while also supporting new filtering features.
  • Improved the feature to show latest edit summaries to translators by improving the layout and formatting of relative dates.
  • Fixed a workflow issue with aggregate message groups in the Translate extension.
  • Deployed a fix for a bug that was resulting in an empty recent changes when no language was selected
  • Investigated and fixed an issue that was causing a delay in updating translation pages
  • Deployed a fix that blocks translations from users for a blocked translatable page.

August 2022[edit]

July 2022[edit]

June 2022[edit]

May 2022[edit]

April 2022[edit]

March 2022[edit]

February 2022[edit]

January 2022[edit]

December 2021[edit]

November 2021[edit]

September 2021[edit]

August 2021[edit]

July 2021[edit]

June 2021[edit]

May 2021[edit]

April 2021[edit]

March 2021[edit]

February 2021[edit]

January 2021[edit]

December 2020[edit]

November 2020[edit]

  • MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB) 2020.10 was released, see release notes here.
  • New system admins are now able to do puppet changes for translatewiki.net after reading our new documentation.

October 2020[edit]

September 2020[edit]

August 2020[edit]

July 2020[edit]

June 2020[edit]

May 2020[edit]

April 2020[edit]

March 2020[edit]

February 2020[edit]

January 2020[edit]

December 2019[edit]

November 2019[edit]

October 2019[edit]

September 2019[edit]

August 2019[edit]

July 2019[edit]

May 2019[edit]

April 2019[edit]

February 2019[edit]

January 2019[edit]

December 2018[edit]

November 2018[edit]

October 2018[edit]

September 2018[edit]

July 2018[edit]