Making multilingual Wikis a reality

Presentation by Niklas Laxström and Claus Christensen

About us

Niklas

Works for the Wikimedia Foundation in the Localisation team
Founder of translatewiki.net, creator of the Translate extension for MediaWiki
Translating open source software since 8 years ago

Claus

Translates KDE stuff to Danish - mostly on UserBase
Active in the KDE web team, focusing on the wikis

In this talk

Mediawiki + Translate extension
Content translation
Why we can't do without
The future

The goal:

Do not waste translators' time

Example: normal free software translation is a pain

Translating the wiki way: if it is not as easy and quick as editing a wiki, you lose most translations

Translators should only do what they are best at

Translating a wiki is not "wiki" at all

Content translation in the old way is still a pain

Create complex templates that show list of translated versions

Translators copy&paste English text, translate

Problematic links

It's alive!

Source pages and translations are disconnected and not coordinated
Updating translations is next to impossible, time sink

Translate extension to the rescue

Structured wiki content page translation

Web-based translation and proofreading

Various translation aids

Statistics

Integrates into MediaWiki

Active development

Implementation on KDE wikis

Install to one wiki with my help
Migrate pages over to the new system
Craft guidelines
Gather feedback and bug reports from translators
Fix bugs and adding features (Sprints!)

The translators workflow

New or modified units are shown in the Special:LanguageStats page

The translation page displays all units on a translatable page

Click on the unit you want to translate, translate it, click save

Authoring handbooks on UserBase

Lowers the bar for new manual writers

no need to learn Docbook
no need to use CVS or git

Collaborative writing
Normal Docbook version is created (semi)automatically
Easy to translate. New translators need no special skills to get started.

Where are we now?

Hundreds of pages in translation

Some issues left

New features coming in

Need to upgrade MediaWiki and Translate

Future of Translate extension

New features developed by Wikimedia Localisation Team to support WMF projects

Reviewing
Workflows
Usability enhancements
Translation memory v2
Search (most requested)

Maturing

Documentation
Stability (stable releases, better unit test coverage)
API (towards to core that can be easily extended or frontend totally replaced)
Usage of Translate is increasing

Pointers

#mediawiki-i18n and #kde-www @ Freenode

niklas.laxstrom@gmail.com

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Translate

http://userbase.kde.org/

http://l10n.laxstrom.name - KDE Finnish translation sprint

Thank you