Hi all,
*Disclaimer*: I'm writing this mail with my translator hat on. Throughout
this email I will give some examples encountered in today's translation
session to clarify my arguments. If you wrote the code that contain those
strings, please don't take this personally - it's a community problem, not
a personal one. This is why I'm not providing the exact message names, but
only the strings.
I've been translating OSS for 25+ years and MediaWiki for almost 20 years.
For me, It has always been a common effort: the devs need to extract the
strings, document them to give context and export them to the proper
tooling, while translators need to understand the product, fill the
(context) gaps and be consistent.
With our 284 languages and hundreds of thousands of strings, we're
definitely on the high side of effort needed for translations. However, in
the last few years (I would say, roughly from Covid) I see more and more
cases when the* effort is moved toward the translators*.
It used to be that commons strings like Yes/No, Log in/Log out
Watch/Unwatch, Edit or Save were only present once per module. Today? "Log
in" (with this exact casing and no combinations) is present at least 5
times in MediaWiki core - User interface. Yes and No - 3 times each. Name
- 4 times and the list on.
Another type of duplication are messages 90%+ alike, such as "Talk pages for
pages in the main/MediaWiki/.template namespace" instead of "Talk pages for
pages in the $1 namespace". I found at least 3 such instances, there might
be more.
But wait, there is more. Strings like " [[{{#special:Contributions
}}/$1|$2]] ([[{{ns:user_talk}}:$1|talk]]) " should not exist at all. First,
there is absolutely no guidance on what parts should be translated. [1] I
would guess only "talk", which should be replaced with reusing the simple
message (aka {{int:talk}}), so nothing to translate. This would save the
translators the significant amount of time needed to decode the message,
make assumptions and (not) translate the text. I have some more examples,
but I'll stop here.
We must not forget that the translators are also members of our community
and the translation time wasted on such strings could be better used doing
other activities in the Wikimedia world. The benefits are not small: 1s
saved over 284 languages means almost 5 minutes. If fixing your string
takes 15 min or less, it's probably worth it.
I therefore encourage developers, project and people managers to* review
their practices* on generating strings and reviewing code in order to *reduce
the number of spurious messages* that the translators need to work on.
Have a great year ahead and may you code be bug-free!
Strainu
[1] As a side question, I'm very curious about the "#special " syntax -
who's expanding that into a proper namespace?