Internationalization - Pywikipedia-l

23 Oct 2010

Hi everyone,

Currently translation of messages outputted to the wiki's is done in 
source. This is quite tedious to maintain. A good step would be to move 
translations to http://www.translatewiki.org so it is much easier to get 
things translated. But how? We have several options.

1. Gettext: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_gettext Supported by 
translatewiki, build in support in python 
(http://docs.python.org/library/gettext.html), but it doesn't seem to be 
really targeted on working on multiple languages the same time like we 
do in for example interwiki.py.

2. Big python dictionary: Easy to implement in pywikipedia but isn't 
really a standard so translatewiki needs to be modified. You can see a 
test in r8684

3. Properties files: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.properties These 
files are used in Java programs to store translations. Supported at 
translatewiki. We could probably parse these with something like 
http://docs.python.org/library/configparser.html . Downside is that 
these files are not utf-8 encoded.

4. YAML : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML . Supported by 
translatewiki, need a lib to use it in pywikipedia.

So what do you guys think? What should we do? Anyone willing to help 
implement this?

We've talked about this several times. I hope we manage to implement 
something this time :-)

Maarten