[Mediawiki-i18n] Pseudolocalization

Ariel T. Glenn ariel at wikimedia.org
Sat Sep 25 10:15:22 UTC 2010


Στις 22-09-2010, ημέρα Τετ, και ώρα 10:51 -0700, ο/η Neil Kandalgaonkar
έγραψε:
> 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.
> 
> That just reminded me of a technique I've seen used elsewhere, 
> pseudolocalization. Basically the system has a pseudo-locale, something 
> like "xx-pseudo", where
> 
>     "Some text"
> 
> is automatically transformed to something like
> 
>     "____ §ømë †ëx† ____"
> 
> 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)
>    - text swell (150%-200% is a good ratio)
>    - any transformations that don't preserve unicode
> 
> Does MediaWiki or interwiki do anything like this? Would you like it if 
> we did?
> 

Yes, actually, I think this would be a very useful feature.  We have had
issues with tab sizes, buttons in the layout and other such things where
there is overlap or other surprises, so being able to catch that ahead
of time would be good, at a minimum.

Ariel




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