[Foundation-l] (Important) Survey translators needed

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Lars thanks for your rant. Betawiki is a tool. It is a tool to localise
software. This is what it does and it is a better mouse trap then the
alternative; ie localising each project separately or submitting patches to
SVN. As Betawiki enables the localisers of the MediaWiki software to
concentrate on localising without a need to need the arcane arts of
programming we currently actually support more languages then ever before.
Yesterday for instance the first Assamese localiser has contributed the
first translations to Betawiki...

When you argue that localisation has happened for the last twenty years, I
have to admit that I am not impressed. Most languages are not even
acknowledged to exist and cannot be selected in any of the modern software.
There are few if any software packages that are as ambitious as MediaWiki in
supporting the 300+ languages that we do. When programmers program, they are
still astounded when they are told that there software will not be accepted
without internationalisation. There are still many programmers around that
argue that English alone should suffice.

Betawiki is there to localise software. With the current number of people
helping out with our localisation, it can be safely argued that localisation
is key to what we do and that internationalisation is a key aspect of
MediaWiki programming. When you argue that there is room for expanding the
functionality of Betawiki, you are completely right and this is what
Nikerabbit is working on in his Summer of Code project. We expect that it
will lead to the ability to support other software then MediaWiki. We are
looking into applying the translations and terminology learned earlier. In
this way it will become an even better mousetrap. We may even try to entice
a dragon to come to the Betawiki lair.

When you expand into translation of texts, SVG and stuff, when you bring
Wiktionary or OmegaWiki in the picture, both are not equiped to take on such
tasks. Wiktionary will never be able to do that as a consequence of its lack
of structure while OmegaWiki has other priorities at the moment. Both are in
essence centrered on terminology and idiom and this makes it even less
likely that OmegaWiki will be a platform for the translations of texts in
the near future.

In conclusion, Betawiki is not likely to support general text translations.
A combination of available tooling may provide functionality that is useful
for translations. To mind come CAT or Machine Aided Translation tools, wiki
technology. The key difference that Betawiki makes is that it enables
localisers.

Thanks,
      GerardM


On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 6:00 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:

> 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)<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_logos_%28pdf%29>
>
> 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
>
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