[Mediawiki-i18n] MediaWiki i18n "call to arms"

Sabine Cretella sabine_cretella at yahoo.it
Mon Apr 2 13:03:36 UTC 2007


Brianna Laugher schrieb:
> Would it not be useful to have some kind of annotated list of system messages?
>
> eg
> 1. Message name
> 2. English contents
> especially important, these two:
> 3. When/where does the user see this?
> 4. Type of message (interface, explanation, warning, link text, link
> target, ...?)
> and maybe
> 5. How important is this to be translated?
>   
Brianna, we were talking exactly this morning about something like this, 
but that implies that we use a CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) tool 
for the localization. In some way a CAT-Tool would make the work on the 
texts to be translated also faster since you do not have to open, edit 
and close single pages, but you work in one rush and then save only 
once. Doing it the actual way sometimes really takes a lot of time when 
servers are slow.

I will probably blog about this since then it is available to a wider 
audience than only the mediawiki-18n list.

> I am sure I am not the only person who, as either a Wikimedia
> administrator, or person setting up my own wiki, has been baffled by
> some of the messages. Some seem to be equal - which is the one that I
> actually want to change? Does this message show up in other places
> that I don't realise?
>
> (As a side note, I still think our current default messages are too
> Wikipedia-fied - and a 'simplfied' English set, like 'young wiki',
> would be cool to have as an option.)
>
> One of the devs once mentioned that system messages should not be
> 'overloaded' eg not everywhere that English speakers put "OK" is
> equivalent in other languages. I totally agree, but it can make
> identifying the necessary message difficult.
>
> (Another sidenote - it would be kind of cool if there was a way to see
> which messages are used in a certain page, kind of like how pages
> currently say which template/s they use)
>
> Anyway. Annotated system messages. Good idea or bad? Manageable?
> Should be put on mediawiki.org or some other way to manage them??
>   
It is a great idea, since it helps to do better work - it needs to be 
database driven in order to make it accessible easily.

/me having a mail overload that is getting somewhat tragic .. sigh ... 
sometimes I feel like being in an e-mail jungle ...

Ciao, Sabine

s.cretella at wordsandmore.it
skype: sabinecretella





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