Translating Central Notices easily, and other Language engineering news

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The Language Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation works on a new set of tasks every two weeks. The following describes the work we have done over the past month.
Language Engineering Team: We have renamed our team from “Internationalization & localization” to “Language Engineering”. The terminology we previously used did not illustrate our goals very clearly. We hope that the new name will communicate our goals and activities better.
Translating Central Notices: The process of translating banner texts for CentralNotice (used for Wikimedia banners) will soon be more streamlined,  after the integration with the Translate extension. It is now possible to create message groups for translation from CentralNotice. We are completing a few pending tasks before making this tool available on Wikimedia projects.

Partially translated Tamil Interface of ULS
Partially translated Tamil Interface of the Universal Language Selector.

Universal Language Selector: The jquery component of Universal Language Selector (ULS) is now internationalized and can be translated. This also fixes the ‘placeholder’ that some of our readers mentioned in comments on our previous posts. ULS also got many bug fixes, including proper input tool support and improved workflow between the settings screens. We are discussing with the Operations team on how to deploy ULS on small Wikimedia wikis without negatively impacting current caching mechanisms for anonymous users.
Project Milkshake: We fixed bugs, fixed tests and addressed review comments related to jquery.i18n, the internationalization library. jquery.uls, a library for language selection, is the latest addition to Milkshake.
San Francisco Meetings: Most of the language engineering team members were in San Francisco in September. We met with other Engineering teams at the Wikimedia Foundation, including the Visual Editor team, and discussed Internationalization requirements with the Mobile team. We talked about Making the Web Multilingual with Wikipedia (video) at San Francisco State University, and presented Project Milkshake at Google, Twitter and change.org.
Other news

  • We held IRC office hours (log) on September 19th, and will be holding the next session on October 17th.
  • We will be in Bangalore in November for the Wikimedia Devcamp.
Srikanth Lakshmanan
Internationalisation/Localisation Outreach / QA Engineer

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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