[Mediawiki-i18n] Translating extensionsI'vewritten...forthcoming changes

Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen at gmail.com
Wed Dec 6 00:26:54 UTC 2006


Hoi,
I am busy as it is, Berto is busy as it is. Both Berto and I are willing 
to spend our time on doing the occasional translation; it is mainly 
maintaining what is already there. Your idea of the "usual way" may be 
usual for developers it is not for us. It is a lot more work. To put the 
problem in perspective, there are currently 250 languages for our 
projects. All of these consist of  one or more projects. This means that 
what is actually the standard way; by translating on the project is a 
massive loss of time. It means that only on projects were someone did 
translate a message you will find a translation. It does not scale and, 
it is simply not good enough.

It has nothing to do with Rob, it has nothing to do with Nikerabbit, it 
is simply not good enough.

Now, what needs doing to get this sorted. We have discussed with 
Nikerabbit that we need better support for the Betawiki functionality. 
As a consequence he has started work on modularising the special 
functionality of Betawiki and, we discussed that it might be best to 
integrate this with the incubator wiki. The motivation is that this is 
where much of the work is  done for new projects before they are going 
life happens. It is therefore instant gratification when messages are 
localised and, this is a powerful motivator.

Well, I hope this is also clear enough :) Please let us know what more 
needs doing to get a *solution* because the current situation is not 
good enough.

Thanks,
    GerardM


helix84 schreef:
> Hello,
> I'm writing to hopefully make things clear for everyone :)
>
> The standard way to do translation is to submit patches to central
> Subversion repository, which is where up-to-date version of MediaWiki
> lives. Rob made his extension available in the repository, so you can
> download it from there and have it commited back there. Now there are
> several ways ho to accomplish the commit. Most of us can't do it,
> because we're not developers, therefore we don't have write-access. We
> need to ask one of the developers. The usual way would be to submit a
> request using Bugzilla, attaching the translated file (usually a patch
> for it). Other way is to contact a developer directly, i.e. using IRC
> or e-mail.
>
> Now the most convenient way for _translators_ is to do the
> translations on Betawiki, because it provides a convenient interface.
> We don't have to mess with .php files and patches. Nikerabbit, who
> runs Betawiki and who is a developer, will do that for us.
>
> Now to the first question - "Will these messages be available at the
> Beta-wiki ?". The answer is - no, for now, it won't. The reason is,
> that Nikerabbit is for now not willing to mess with extensions, which
> are separate pieces of software from MediaWiki. At least that's what
> me told me last time I asked. You have to ask him this question to get
> a qualified answer. Rob Church has nothing to do with that. Nikerabbit
> runs betawiki.
>
> You can still do the translation the usual way, though. Download i18n
> files for an extension from Subversion. You can use the web interface
> ( http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/ ),
> though it may sometimes screw up encoding.
> Then make your translation and file a new request at bugzilla (
> http://bugzilla.mediawiki.org/ ), where you attach the updated file.
>
> So please, translators, don't blame Rob Church that he doesn't know
> how we do translations. And please, Rob, don't blame translators that
> they have no idea how software development works. We're cooperating
> here! :)
>
> If there's something that i didn't put clearly enough, please, ask.
> ~~helix84




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