[Foundation-l] (Important) Survey translators needed

[Lars Aronsson]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> The localisation of the MediaWiki messages needs to be done only 
> once and, they are best done in Betawiki. Doing it this way you 
> ensure that the work is done only once.

This is a nice theory, except for the fact that most messages 
(user, login, diff, edit, file, save, move, rename) have already 
been translated in previous projects (from GNU Emacs onwards) in 
the last 20 years.  Instead of inventing the wheel every year, we 
need to establish a single platform (Betawiki? sure, why not! or 
maybe Wiktionary? or Omegawiki?) to serve translations for all 
free projects from now on, not only those of the Wikimedia 
Foundation, but also GNU, KDE, Mozilla and other projects, such as 
this survey.

I tried to find "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" and "Imagine a 
world..." in some languages, and found this spread out over 
[[en:Wikipedia:Slogans]] and various donation calls on meta, such 
as http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Donate/th

These phrases are not available in Betawiki, and it doesn't seem 
feasible to move them there.  Betawiki might be a huge timesaver, 
but it's far more limited than the generic translation platform 
that is needed.  Betawiki has no advanced mechanism for searching 
or categorizing.  Using subpages of the MediaWiki namespace is way 
too primivitve. Imagine replacing the list in 
[[en:Wikipedia:Slogans]] with pointer to Betawiki.  Wouldn't that 
require Betawiki to evolve quite a lot?

What about vector graphics versions of the Wikipedia logotype with 
the title in the right font, can that be stored in Betawiki?  I 
found a couple in PDF by yourself, 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_logos_(pdf)

Where can I find a free content list of common questionnaire 
questions that have been translated to various languages?

> When you consider the time of localisers, Nikerabbit wrote a great
> comparison between the gettext and the Betawiki approach.
> http://nike.fixme.fi/blag/2008/05/29/two-paradigms-gettext-and-mediawiki/

This young man is on to something, but I guess we'll have to wait 
another 2-3 years before a unified platform becomes useful.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se