Frequently large translation projects are carried out in Meta: Updates from the WMF, Fundraising banners and editor appeals, surveys etc.
Now the volunteers are asked to translate the 2011 Editor survey. It is a very long document with many repetitive strings. It requires many comments and explanations about wording, as the discussions on Translators-l demonstrate.
The translation is done using the plain MediaWiki interface of Meta. This has many issues, because MediaWiki was never focused on translation. The issues are many:
- there's faulty RTL support for RTL languages.
- there's no Translation memory to make working with repetitive strings efficient.
- using the browser built-in spell-checking is hard in this environment.
- there's no easy way to review and proofread translations and compare them to other languages.
- there's no structured way for the original document authors to comment on the source strings.
- in large translation projects the alignment of the original strings with the translated ones may get lost because of wrong order of line breaks.
- There's no way to automatically and comprehensively check the translation status of every language. Then translator manually adds his language, manually marks it as "progress", "proofread" and "ready". A Meta admin must manually check the statuses and manually copy it to the target.
- There's no automatic way to notify the translators that the source string has been updated.
The Translate extension for MediaWiki solves all these issues. It is successfully and extensively used in Translatewiki.net for translating MediaWiki and its extensions and several other projects.
Please start using the Translate extension for translation projects in Meta. This will make the translation much more efficient and save a lot of time for everyone. Thank you.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement