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Making Multilingual Wikis a reality

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Making multilingual Wikis a reality

Presentation by Niklas Laxström and Claus Christensen

About us

Niklas

  • Works for the Wikimedia Foundation in the Localisation team
  • Founder of translatewiki.net, creator of the Translate extension for MediaWiki
  • Translating open source software since 8 years ago

Claus

  • Translates KDE stuff to Danish - mostly on UserBase
  • Active in the KDE web team, focusing on the wikis

In this talk

  • Mediawiki + Translate extension
  • Content translation
  • Why we can't do without
  • The future

The goal:

Do not waste translators' time

Example: normal free software translation is a pain

Translating the wiki way: if it is not as easy and quick as editing a wiki, you lose most translations

Translators should only do what they are best at

Translating a wiki is not "wiki" at all

Content translation in the old way is still a pain

Create complex templates that show list of translated versions

Translators copy&paste English text, translate

Problematic links

It's alive!

  • Source pages and translations are disconnected and not coordinated
  • Updating translations is next to impossible, time sink
Translate extension to the rescue
  • Structured wiki content page translation
  • Web-based translation and proofreading
  • Various translation aids
  • Statistics
  • Integrates into MediaWiki
  • Active development

Implementation on KDE wikis

  • Install to one wiki with my help
  • Migrate pages over to the new system
  • Craft guidelines
  • Gather feedback and bug reports from translators
  • Fix bugs and adding features (Sprints!)

The translators workflow

New or modified units are shown in the Special:LanguageStats page

The translation page displays all units on a translatable page

Click on the unit you want to translate, translate it, click save

Authoring handbooks on UserBase

  • Lowers the bar for new manual writers
    • no need to learn Docbook
    • no need to use CVS or git
  • Collaborative writing
  • Normal Docbook version is created (semi)automatically
  • Easy to translate. New translators need no special skills to get started.

Where are we now?

Hundreds of pages in translation

Some issues left

New features coming in

Need to upgrade MediaWiki and Translate

Future of Translate extension

  • New features developed by Wikimedia Localisation Team to support WMF projects
    • Reviewing
    • Workflows
    • Usability enhancements
    • Translation memory v2
    • Search (most requested)

  • Maturing
    • Documentation
    • Stability (stable releases, better unit test coverage)
    • API (towards to core that can be easily extended or frontend totally replaced)
    • Usage of Translate is increasing

Pointers

#mediawiki-i18n and #kde-www @ Freenode

niklas.laxstrom@gmail.com

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Translate

http://userbase.kde.org/

http://l10n.laxstrom.name - KDE Finnish translation sprint

Thank you