New subject: Mediawiki software localisation -- OmegaT

23 Aug 2005

Hi all,

I received an e-mail from Dwayne Bailey, coordinator of
translate.org.za (free software localisation group for South African
languages), in which he showed interest in the idea of assisting with
MediaWiki localisation in South African languages.

He also suggested using Pootle, about which you can find more at
http://translate.sourceforge.net/ .

There have been a couple of mails on this list I believe about
encouraging localisation somewhat independently of projects, so that
for example a Ladino interface translation could be completed without
the existance of a Ladino Wikipedia or other Wikimedia project. Of
course, this is already possible, but it's unlikely to happen. Within
that framework, it could become a prelaunch condition for requests for
new language versions of Wikimedia projects, and would also allow for
more collaborative translation rather than the current system where
most system messages are translated by one or two sysops in the
MediaWiki namespace, while regular users look on without the ability
to make corrections.

While the current preferred method of localisation appears to be to
use the MediaWiki namespace, this doesn't work well with the
recently-introduced ability to choose ones' own interface language in
preferences: if I choose on en.wiki to view the interface in, say,
Navajo, or Amharic, or Bengali, nothing shows up because most or all
of the translations for these languages were made in the MediaWiki
namespace.

While this may not seem like a major concern, I think that there are
more than a few editors on the major language versions who speak that
language as their second language and might prefer to view the user
interface in their native language. This may still not seem like a
major concern because, after all, don't all of the "major languages"
of the world have full translations of language.php? Unfortunately,
this is not the case, and is limited almost completely to the
languages of Europe, with few exceptions. Languages such as Bengali,
Amharic, Telugu, Fulfulde, Armenian, are all major world languages
with millions of speakers (Bengali, for example, is the national
language of Bangladesh, and a regional language of India, two of the
most populous nations on Earth, for both of which English is a
relatively common second language), each of them has a
widely-translated interface in the MediaWiki namespace, but none of
them has a LanguageXX.php file, or if they do, it has few or no system
messages.

Mark

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dwayne Bailey &lt;______(a)______.___&gt;
Date: 23-Aug-2005 03:06
Subject: Re: Mediawiki software localisation
To: Mark Williamson &lt;node.ue(a)gmail.com&gt;

...

This is a great idea, I will investigate how we can translate this.  Do
you think you guys would be interested in using Pootle
(http://pootle.wordforge.org) so that other languages can easily
translate?

...

Mediawiki software localisation -- Pootle