Hello everybody,
Following the suggestion of Andre Klapper https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T150933#2886290, I'm turning to this set of lists to see if it can attract more feedback on the topic of internationalized programming facilities within WM environment https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T150933.
As described more extensively in the ticket,the idea is to implement internationalization facilities (if they don't exist yet) in compilers used in the WM infrastructure, and enable contributors to localize them (possibly through Translatewiki), and then let them use localized versions if they wish.
Please let me know if you need more details or if you have any question. You can answer on the list or on phabricator, as you wish.
Kind regards, Mathieu
I think it is easier to create a new localizable programming environment from scratch, than to try to localize existing tools and APIs.
For example, block-based programming languages (like Scratch and eToys) tend to be fairly easy to translate -- there are some issues regarding fixed size labels, the meaning of concatenating labels in various langauges, etc, but these programs proved surmountable. We used these extensively at One Laptop per Child.
At OLPC I worked on a block-based JavaScript-subset, which allowed complete translation between "text based" and "block based" views of the code: http://turtlescript.github.cscott.net/ You could localize the labels in the block-based version and still "compile down" to the legacy/English APIs.
As some folks know I've been a persistent advocate for JavaScript in Scribunto, and I've contributed to v8js to this end.
Another option is to move away from textual scripting languages on wiki entirely. For example, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T114454 proposes using Visual Editor to perform more of the "template" tasks, with a stronger separation of code, "layout", and data. Template edits which affect the visual presentation or the data ("arguments") but not the underlying code should be possible in Visual Editor in a fully localized manner. The textual "code" portion would be de-emphasized for most tasks. For tasks which do require "code" to be written, you'd use one of the techniques described above. --scott
mediawiki-i18n@lists.wikimedia.org