Language tools/Interventions

The Language annual plan includes the audit of language tools as an initial step to plan improvements the different tools supported by the Language team. A list of proposed interventions is captured to identify key areas of work. You can check below the criteria followed, the areas selected, as well as other areas that have been considered out of the scope of the current initiative.

We are interested to hear your impressions about these plans. Please provide your feedback in the Language tools talk page. Let us know if there is any key piece of work for the selected areas, or new areas we should consider.

Criteria

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For this particular initiative we have considered the following criteria:

  • Impact. Improvements provide a clear benefit to their direct users, or the larger community. Even if the impact is hard to measure in some cases, there should be a clear narrative on how the improvements in an area are helping to achieve our goals significantly better.
  • Being realistic. Given the available resources, we need to pick areas where we can make progress. This work is planned for a period where the Language team will share its time with the work on version 2 of Content Translation which is a big project already.
  • Focus on maintenance. Give priority to improving existing infrastructure over creating new tools. The initiative targets to reduce the work that has been accumulating for existing tools that are used every day.

Proposed areas

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Based on the criteria above, the proposed areas are captured below:

Improve the quality of translations for Translate extension

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Translators that work providing content in their language need contextual information to provide high quality translations. Providing them better information and assistance will help them make better translations.

Impact

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Translators produce better translations (and maybe faster as well). Users of different languages get a better experience when using our products.

Interventions

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Fluent import/export processes for Translate extension

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Administrative efforts are required to set-up the translation process for a project. Creating the project, exporting the messages to be translated and import back the translations back into the software. These administrative processes requires effort that can be reduced.

Impact

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Faster translation updates means: developer teams have to wait less to get their translations, translators see the impact of their work earlier (more motivated), and less effort required by admins. A platform where setting-up projects is easy, encourages creating more of them.

Interventions

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Improve processes for i18n support to be more fluent

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Wikimedia has a robust process for managing localisations. It has evolved over time and requirements have changed. These processes can be simplified to avoid unnecessary duplication in language data and code.

Impact

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Consolidating our different language data and code into libraries that are used in our projects makes the language experience consistent for developers and users. Maintenance overhead is reduced and there is less difference between backend (PHP) and frontend (JS).

Interventions

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Other areas not in scope

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These are some areas that have been considered but not included in the list of proposals based on the above criteria: