[Mediawiki-i18n] Pseudolocalization

[Niklas Laxström]

On 22 September 2010 20:51, Neil Kandalgaonkar <neilk at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> So, a designer here at the foundation just found one of their designs
> doesn't work so well for German, which has significant "text swell"
> versus English.

> The idea is that you can test for three things even before the
> translators get to it:
>   - which parts of the system aren't internationalized yet (they are
> noticeable since they don't get this pseudolocalization)

Such code wouldn't likely survive in the code review.

>   - text swell (150%-200% is a good ratio)

Web layout are usually very liquid, and thus we shouldn't have that
much of a problem with long texts. Of course there are cases like wide
tables where we run into problems.

>   - any transformations that don't preserve unicode

Such as? For what it's worth, double html-escaping or not escaping at
all is far more common problem.

> Does MediaWiki or interwiki do anything like this? Would you like it if
> we did?

It is probably impossible to do this, for the same reason we cannot do
'click this interface message to translate it on sight'. There is too
much configuration stuff and other things abusing messages that break
MediaWiki if the input is unexpected.

- Niklas

-- 
Niklas Laxström