Hi Stacey,
 
great suggestion to have context hints for messages. Niklas thought the same thing a few days ago and implemented it. Now we need 'people in the know' to document them. The hints are being displayed when editing messages.
 
We keep the messages in a language code assigned to 'local' in ISO 639-3, 'qqq'. An overview of currently documented messages, that can be edited by everyone with the role 'translator' can be found here:
* core messages: http://translatewiki.net/w/?title=Special%3ATranslate&task=reviewall&group=core&language=qqq&limit=100 
* extension messages: http://translatewiki.net/w/?title=Special%3ATranslate&task=reviewall&group=ext-0-all&language=qqq&limit=100
 
If you already have editing rights, you can see the hints in action on http://translatewiki.net/w/?title=MediaWiki:Ogg-long-audio/de&action=edit
 
It is of course a huge task to document everything, but if we all pitch in, it's only 3600 pieces of documentation ;)
 
We are still thinking if we should commit the message documentation at some point... Especially because those developers may edit MessagesQqq.php and definately not edit in Betawiki.
 
Cheers! Siebrand


Van: mediawiki-i18n-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-i18n-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] Namens Stacey Doljack Borsody
Verzonden: donderdag 3 januari 2008 17:09
Aan: MediaWiki internationalisation; Wikimedia developers
CC: 'Wikimedia Translators'
Onderwerp: Re: [Mediawiki-i18n] [Wikitech-l] An update on localisation inMediaWiki

 <snip> 
Now if only we could get some better context documentation for each message there won't be such problematic translations.  Take for example 'editingsection' or 'editingcomment'.  The English is pretty vague and sure enough the translation was rather silly when I finally saw it in Wikipedia.  Siebrand claims it only takes 16 hours to translate the most used messages, but that's only if you know exactly what the variables in messages are and which messages are variables in other messages .
<snip>