The Wikimedia Language Engineering team completed its recent development sprints with a focus on feature completeness of ‘Translate User eXperience’ or ‘TUX’ for deployment and also made preparations for its new community outreach project. Below are some of the highlights from the sprint.
Translate Editor – TUX, has been deployed: The Language Engineering team has been blogging on improvements to the Translate Extension which has now been deployed to WMF sites and been enabled as the default editor on translatewiki.net. Issues encountered while using the new editor can be reported via Bugzilla. More details about TUX’s design features can be found in our previous blog post.
New Language Outreach Program: A new outreach and support program to facilitate feedback from our language wiki projects is also currently in development. The program would facilitate focused feedback about the tools being developed and reaching out with solutions to the larger communities working on Wikimedia projects in various languages. The pilot phase is scheduled for launch in the coming weeks and an announcement with the details of the program will be shortly made.
Updates to the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB): In other news, Amir Aharoni announced the release of the new version of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB). Besides development updates to TUX, version 2013.3 of MLEB includes bug fixes to the Universal Language Selector (ULS) as well as new fonts for Hebrew, Javanese and Arabic. Last but not least, a Marshallese input method has been contributed to jQuery.ime by Nick Doiron.
Testing plan for language tools: A preliminary outline of a testing plan for all internationalization tools currently maintained by the team was completed. Guided by earlier discussions with the Fedora Localization Testing Group (FLTG), the initial draft includes setup of test environment, preparing test scenarios, collecting feedback and analyzing results.
Preparations for visualization of language coverage information: Work also continued on the Language Coverage Matrix, a collection of data about the availability of language tools for different languages in Wikimedia projects. Currently, the focus is to prepare a technical specification for automated presentation and access to this information.
Event participation and other news: Siebrand Mazeland represented the Wikimedia Language Engineering team at the Internationalization and Localization Conference organized by Lingoport in Santa Clara. (More details: presentation slides, and talk recording)
The ongoing development sprint will focus on creating a new design for the translatewiki.net homepage, launch of the pilot phase for Language support outreach program, and publication of the Language Engineering roadmap for the next fiscal year 2013-2014. The Language Engineering team is also looking to hire JavaScript and PHP engineers with deep experience in i18n and l10n technologies. Additionally, a few of the projects that are open for participation have been listed here.
The Language Engineering team is available to answer any technical questions you may have about the tools it develops. You can join us at our monthly office hour scheduled this month on April 10, 1700 UTC and 1000 PDT or find us on irc.freenode.net at #mediawiki-i18n. Logs from the last office hour held on March 13, 2013 can be found here.
Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering
Can you help us translate this article?
In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?
Start translation