Translation editor growing snazzier

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(Emor me’at ve-ase harbe. —a Hebrew proverb)
The Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Engineering team is continuing the makeover of the Translate extension, which started taking shape in early December. (Introduced in 2011, this MediaWiki feature powers the translation of Wikipedia’s software, announcements, reports and fundraising banners, and of other sites and software projects.)
During its latest two-week sprint, the team improved the actual interface used for submitting and editing translations:

A screenshot of the new work-in-progress translation editor

Information about the message and translations to other languages are now shown in a collapsible box on the right side of the translation area. Warnings about potential errors in the message are shown in a small box above the editing area, which is expandable, too.
The functionality for saving and skipping messages was updated. Usability testing observations by Arun Ganesh and Pau Giner suggest that users facing a hard part in a translation are more likely to just skip it than to report the problem. Because of this, skipping a message is now recorded and frequently skipped messages will be considered for re-wording.
In the next sprint the team will work on polishing the translation interface further: better display of documentation, translation suggestions and diffs, better responsiveness, more robust language selection and other features.
In other Language Engineering news:

  • The December 2012 version of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle was released.
  • Better support for language variants and alternative language codes was added to the Universal Language Selector.

Amir E. Aharoni, Software Engineer (Internationalization)

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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