[Translators-l] Ready for early translation: Tech News summary #1 (2014)

[Philippe Verdy]

You'll note that I have tried to work on the top navigation banner on Meta
(to access the historics). This part is not intended to be sent to
subscribers and should only work in Meta.

However I have still an issue for a few languages that don't use decimal
digits 0-9 (such as Farsi/Persian, Bengali, ...) n their date format.
Apparently there's a bug in the parser function #time on Meta that ignores
the xn or xN flafs when using numeric date values or when parsing dates.
I'm investigating it. But this should not block the delivery of
translations (and those languages still don't have any translation
regularly updated).

I've also seen that week numbers were smetimes inconsistant in 2013, using
the week number of the past week, when this first issue of Tech News for
2014 now uses the ISO week numbering.

I've also fixed the translation of previous/next links when the a week
number is skipped: now the previous/next link only specify the
(untranslated) pagename of the weekly issue, it generates the
"Special:MyLanguage/" prefix and reuses the translation for the displayed
terms "previous"/"next".

And we no longer need the redirect from "Tech/News/2013/52" to
"Tech/News/2014/01"). This means that if there are missing weeks, we can
easily link to the correct name (and if later the naming scheme is changed
we could test the values.

I've also fixed the RTL issues (there were incorrect assumptions that the
navigation bar should be only LTR), so now the display is also correct in
Arabic, Yiddish and Hebrew.

There are repeteated translated items fpr "ltr" vs. "rtl" but not a lot and
I made things simple by avoiding another indirection using a "/layout"
subtemplate passing the parameters.

Localized date formats still require more work on Meta, exising formatting
templates have their own issue, so for now I've just placed the tricky
wikicode in the base navigation template. Note that these formats use the
#time parserfunction (I've documented it in the only complex resource, by
placing a link to the MediaWiki documentation about #time). There's no
emergency, but translators should review some default formats I used for
displaying the full date (week numbers are not understood by everyone,
there are competing conventions, and I think it's still useful to convert
them to a readable date) :

The date displayed for a week number is on Monday in that week ; converting
ISO week numbers to Gregorian dates is a bit tricky with #time, may be I'll
use another template for this conversion, unless I find an existing one I
can reuse; and I'll probavly use the Template:Date for the formatting, in
which case I'll simply the #time format used for rendering "<year>, <week>
(<formated date>)". For now only one format string is used to generate
everything.

Unfortunately localizing dates on a multilingual site is quite complex and
things are still not supported by #time:
- a prefix flag like "xo" for specifying the ordinal form of day numbers or
an alternate format speficier like "J" instead of "d" or "j" to generate
the corretly suffixed ordinal form of days of month (it is language
dependant).
- support for CLDR format selectors such as "x{ymd}" to indicate we want a
localized date displaying day of month, month and year, in the default
calendar for the locale, or "x{yyyymmdd}" for the fixed-width numeric
format with leading zeroes, without having to wonder which separators to
use. This "x{...}" fomat specifier should deprecate most uses of existing
specifiers for subfields.
- support for grammatical variant forms to insert them correctly in
translated sentences (please don't concatenate phrase fragments in from
separate resources).
- correcting the bug of #time that apparently ignores the "xn" or "xN"
flags when displaying a translated page for which the Translate extension
changes the language tag of the full page (it does this incoherently with
language codes explicitly used in computing templates).

Among other things, I've translated many other things to French on Meta and
I try to fix many holes left in past translations.


2013/12/28 Guillaume Paumier <gpaumier at wikimedia.org>

> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 7:17 PM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski
> <tomasz at twkozlowski.net> wrote:
> >
> > the latest issue of your favourite tech newsletter is ready for
> > translation at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2014/01
>
> No new information has come up, so I've frozen the newsletter. There
> hasn't been any changes since Tomasz sent the previous message, so if
> you've already translated the content, you don't have anything to
> change :)
>
> We'll send the newsletter in about 1.5 day.
>
> --
> Guillaume Paumier
>
> _______________________________________________
> Translators-l mailing list
> Translators-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/translators-l
>
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