#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

Supporting #plural in #gettext and #MediaWiki

Gettext, the #i18n module of the #GNU software, is and has been really import for the internationalisation and localisation of open and free software. To a large extend it is what is used by many localisation platform.

What gettext provides is technology. What it does not provide is the specific rules needed to implement the internationalisation for a specific language. When we bootstrapped plural support at translatewiki.net, we copied the rules from other applications to start of with.

The way plural is implemented for applications supported at translatewiki.net is well documented. When you read the documentation, it is clear that there is no consistency and these inconsistencies are documented.

One of our contributors, Lloffiwr is taking an active interest in the subject and is compiling a list that shows the MediaWiki plural rules for the languages enabled for localisation at translatewiki.net. Such a list informs our localisers what is expected of them when they localise a message with plural support.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Support for #gender and #plural in #JavaScript may mean refactoring code

There are all kinds of valid reasons to revisit code. Improving the design of existing code is definitely one. Often code is changed because additional code needs to be applied. Sometimes, like in the case of implementing JQuery in our JavaScript code, it leads to code that performs better and it has many additional features that are now available to use.

One of the ambitions at translatewiki.net has been the support of GENDER and PLURAL in the messages used in JavaScript code. In order to provide such support, there is a need for functionality that provides the same functionality we have had for so long in PHP.

The JavaScript code to support GENDER and PLURAL has been written. It makes use of JQuery functionality and when the maintainers are lucky, their code already supports it. For the localisers at translatewiki.net, the answer "the software is written in JavaScript" is no longer a valid reason not to expect messages to be changed,
Thanks,
     GerardM