[Translators-l] Special:PageLanguage (was: [Wikimedia-l] We have an awesome Translation Tools....made for English speakers first)

[svetlana]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2014, at 00:52, Niklas Laxström wrote:
> Translate extension has supported for a long time having any language
> as the source language. There just has not been an interface in
> MediaWiki to set the source language of a page.
> 
> The good news is that Kunal Grover, a GSoC student has created
> Special:PageLanguage to do just that. [1] I expect it will be
> available quite soon.
> [...]
> 
> [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kunalgrover05/Progress_Report

On Fri, 15 Aug 2014, at 01:50, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> This is good development, but I don't see why we need a special page to
> define what is metadata of the page itself.
> [...]

Yes, I have same question.

On Fri, 15 Aug 2014, at 01:50, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> May be it will be accessible
> from the VisualEditor; like we edit categories, but such metadata is a
> general need for lots of other applications. The general need would be to
> be able to associate metadata with a symbolic type to any page: just a few
> metadata is currently handled in MediaWiki: categories, default
> sortkeys, interwiki links, plus a few other flags inserted by using magic
> words (like __NOINDEX__).
> 
> There are also external metadata stored in Wikidata for some wiki projects.
> More are needed (e.g. for different typing sort keys).
> Any way I expect to see soon a reliable way to detect the page language
> including for translated pages; but more importantly for sources of
> translations without having to assume they are in English, or create thme
> in another language and creating a pseudo-translation to the original
> language by copying keys, then modifying the English source again but
> keeping the original text.
> At least, when we mark a new page for translation, we should immediately
> have an option asking in which language is the source; if it's not specifid
> by the new experimental Special:PageLanguage page (which is not necessarily
> needed).
> 
> And once a source page has been marked for translation, the Translate tool
> should have a simple API to query its language or the language used in the
> generated translations, And ideally, we should be able to swithc from one
> source language to another (for example some projects start in English, but
> are later managed in German or Chinese, or a local Chapter initially
> creates documents in its own local language such as French, Hindi or
> Spanish, and will not use English as the reference (this is important for
> pages reporting local projects mostly done in other languages, outside
> countries or regions with a majority of native English-speakers, i.e: most
> countries of the world, including Europe (and even North America where
> French and Spanish are very present too ; Spanish and Chinese are also
> growing fast in US, and here there are aslo local communities that would
> like to promote their own local projects in their native non-English tongue
> : do you remember that US does not have any "official" language ?).

Kunal Grover, could you please fill in about that?

svetlana