Words and what not: Luxembourg

Showing posts with label Luxembourg. Show all posts

Friday, March 16, 2012

#mlwlux - #Wikipedia, how many people do live in #Amsterdam

At the Multilingual Web conference in Luxembourg, it was mentioned that Amsterdam has a different number of people living there depending on what Wikipedia you are reading.

It needs a solution it was said. Yes it does and letting us know is part of a solution. It certainly allows the number for Amsterdam to become the same. A real solution would be one where such data is maintained centrally and served where ever it is needed.

The Wikidata project is starting and one of its objectives is to serve as a central data repository. The people at the conference will appreciate that it is not simple; 783.364 is the number quoted on the Dutch Wikipedia while an American would say that a number like 783,364 is quite a lot more.

Anyway; we do appreciate that the numbers game and the data game is very much something we have fun with in the near future.
Thanks,
GerardM

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

#multilingweb - #Arabic and #Hebrew are #RTL

Amir asked me to ask at the Multilingual Web conference in conference to people like Richard Ishida:

"How hard would it be to allow assigning element directionality according to lang. In HTML4 and in the current draft of HTML5, <span lang="ar"> has dir="ltr", unless specified otherwise, and I find it ridiculous".

The usual replies Amir gets is:

Backwards compatibility
Many websites already use HTML-5 even though it is not a finished product. This will break them

His reply to this:

If a document explicitly specifies that it's HTML5, it should have directionality assignment by default.
Add an attribute to the root HTML tag, something like: <html dir="bylang"> or <html dirbylang="true">

Amir has aired his view before and an answer he gets from some "standards people" is: "It would be very problematic to do it, because most web developers don't use the lang attribute". This is rather funny because this will work only when the lang attribute is used. And anyway at some point in time the public at large do not care really about previous versions of HTML as all the websites still in use will have moved on.

What we need is proper meta data for all languages and such data can hide very nicely inside a browser. Developers of websites do not know and want to know about all the linguistic niceties necessary to support a multi lingual web. It so many ways it makes sense to provide language support from inside the browser.

At the Wikimedia Foundation we we don't just support a lot of languages, we are also well aware of the languages we support. Ours is a world-wide community of people who have the opportunity to openly complain to us about bad support for their language and they expect that their complaint is actually read and is being taken care of.

Thanks,

GerardM

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

#multilingweb - #i18N and #l10n testing framework

A subject for the conference about the Multilingual Web is what gaps exist in supporting a multilingual web. Obviously people who are living the multilingual web like my colleagues in the WMF localisation team suffer these gaps. Our team has been asked what to do next and one idea of Amir I love to put forward.

A testing framework for localization
I searched and I couldn't find any testing framework that is focused on localization. Many localization-specific issues must be tested, for example, grammatical correctness of generated messages, text readability in different scripts, support for encodings and fonts, etc. You can find a fuller list in Wikipedia (i wrote most of that section myself). It is possible to test all these things using the current frameworks, but much of it would be manual.

For example, i'm not familiar with any tool that would automatically or semi-automatically create screenshots of all the possible translated strings with their complete context. This would be useful for the translator, to see how to translate a message; for the developer, to see whether any message runs out of the screen or hides a button that must remain visible; and for the tester who speaks the language and wants to see whether all the generated messages are grammatically correct. Currently, a developer must do this manually;
it is time-consuming, inefficient, hard to plan and to maintain, and the fact is that the developers are hardly ever doing this.

Such a testing framework would be really great for so many organisations. At translatewiki.net we support many organisations with their internationalisation and localisation. A framework will make it easy to repeat the testing often. This will improve consistency and quality and makes for a great multi lingual experience.
Thanks,
GerardM

Monday, March 12, 2012

#Standards - A gap in plural support

#multilingweb

When you can speak only for fifteen minutes, there is so much you do not have the time for. Issues that are relevant, things the conference is meant to address.

When I wrote about plural, a subject that is actively discussed on translatewiki.net, Niklas told me about his frustration that his inventory plural rules in various databases had not resulted in anything at all.

As the Multilingual Web conference explicitly asks to identify where standards and best practices cover our needs, this is certainly one that is relevant to us.

As the hashtag of the conference will surely find its way to twitter, this can be seen as an experiment; will people who will go to the conference see this and will there be some follow up at the conference.
Thanks,
GerardM

PS Niklas will be at the conference as well

Sunday, March 11, 2012

The web is Multilingual - #multilingweb

Presenting at the conference about the Multilingual Web will be fun. When you read what the conference is about, what they ask presenters to include in their presentations is interesting:

existing best practices and/or standards that are relevant
new standards and best practices that are currently in development
gaps that are not covered by best practices and/or standards

In so many ways, what we do is implement the best practices as we know them. We are establishing best practices and are running into the gaps of the standards regularly because no other project supports the 412 languages that have an existing Wikipedia or are requesting a Wikipedia.

It is great for us to have two people at this conference; we will learn a lot from the other presenters and from the people who attend. We expect that many best practices are set into a professional environment. Our environment consists of dedicated volunteers. The monthly update to our community of localisers at translatewik.net has 4600 recipients. Our puzzle will be to adapt what we learn for our setting.

We want to learn about translation work flow, we want to discuss what to do about languages that are not yet supported in the CLDR. Most of all we want to learn what we do not know, our blind spots.

Thanks,

GerardM