#Wikidata supports over 300 languages - implications

Wikidata is a single project that supports over 300 languages. The aim is that all data is usable in any and all of them. One important consequence is that for each item 300 translations of the label are needed.

Obviously less items is more. Each item has to have a purpose that is clear, obvious and cannot be expressed in another way.

For this reason I am opposed to the addition of all kinds of subclasses that add no value. There is no point to "APA Award". It is an award that is conferred by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and it can be easily described in two statements.

It makes it extra hard to add translations. It is relevant to know that it is an award. It is important to know who conferred it but there is no point having this expressed in a combined item.  There is no point, it does not fit with the work that is done on awards. It makes Wikidata less usable and consequently such items need to be deleted.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Reading the wiki of "other" #Wikimedia chapters

With the announcement of the Chapter Council Steering Committee who will prepare the way for 26 chapters to join a Wikimedia Chapters Association, the need to communicate will become even more obvious for the chapters that are involved. Obviously chapters primarily exist for the people who live in the area or the country that is the remit of that chapter. The "language of the land" will therefore take centre stage on their wiki.

When visitors from abroad can navigate the essential pages of a Wiki, it will help a lot when these pages are translated. They will want to know the basic information, the monthly reports.. Once published, they are all fairly static and consequently they are prime candidates for translation.

When the websites used by the chapters are wikis, it will be easy to implement the Translate extension. Once a visitor has arrived and selects a language in the preferences, translated pages will show up in this language will show when the "mylanguage" special page is used in the Wiki link. The syntax is like this:

[[Special:Mylanguage/Article name|Article name]]

If you refer to pages that are translated in this way reading the content becomes more convenient.

Thanks,
      Gerard

Translate reports of the #Hungarian #Wikimedia chapter

Like so many chapters, the Hungarian chapter writes monthly reports. Their main audience are the members of the chapter and for them Hungarian is a must. Many of the international partners and relations need the same report in English.

The Hungarian monthly reports are really needed in two languages. Having them translated in other languages would certainly be appreciated; the German WikimediaWoche for instance refers regularly to newly published chapter reports. This is a great argument for having reports translated in German. When people want to translate the Hungarian reports in another language, adding that language is only a click away.

Obviously many more chapters post their monthly reports you can also find them on chaptersplanet.org . Having the reports both in English and in the language of the land seems obvious. When more chapters translate their reports, it becomes relevant to translate the pages on Meta that point to these reports as well. This in turn will promote the translation of the reports of other chapters even more.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikimedia #Incubator in more languages

On the Incubator, a lot of thought goes into providing the best functionality to the people who want a project in a new language. Often these people do not speak English. Providing information to these fledgling projects has so far been done in English; we did not really have an easy way of providing translations.

Today at Incubator, the Translate extension has been enabled. People who do know English are now able to translate essential information in their language. This will make it easier for people to find their way and work on the initial documents for a language.

With this functionality in place, it is also a great moment to update these documents. Spending time now saves time later. SPQRobin made the request, Niklas did the configuration and once Robin is ready it will be for the Incubator community to prepare the way for those people who do not know English.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#betacowork ; a great place to work in #Brussels

In time for #FOSDEM; #Wikimedia people were looking for a place to work, have great connectivity and talk shop. At BetaGroup Coworking we found a warm welcome, and experienced how its customers are provided with what they need. For us it was a white board and guess what, someone brought chocolate cake..

We found a quiet spot where we discussed the usability and the user interface of the Translate functionality. Having Jon Harald with us proved to be a boon. He did the project management for the Fundraiser localisations and brought us a large amount of observations and suggestions.

Having a white board allowed us to easily visualise our ideas and as easily replace them with something else, something better. Once we achieved a common understanding, Jon Harald's input was translated in a "user story" by Siebrand and this will eventually end up as more work for Niklas.

PS According to Jon Harald it is not cold ... not cold enough to wear a coat.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Translations in #SVG

Scalable Vector Graphics provide wonderful crisp illustrations that look smart in any size. Texts can be included in such graphics for instance to point to a named detail. When text is included, it scales with the image.

It is possible to include texts in multiple languages in a SVG image. For us the trick is to make these translations available in MediaWiki.

After a first stab at translations for SVG at the Toolserver, Harry Burt (User:Jarry1250) has gone one better and started writing an extension that will allow for the translation of SVG texts at Commons. To do this, Harry needed access to the Wikimedia source repository. He did get access and has written a prototype extension. He submitted a patch that allows the same SVG to be rendered in different languages, but it may take time for that to become part of MediaWiki core.

Thanks,

     GerardM

Need a #translation workshop?

The #Wikimedia Foundation is an international organisation. Its projects are in 280+ languages and are developed by 280+ language communities. When a message is to go out to all these people. a serious amount of outreach and translation is needed.

At translatewiki.net, the localisation of the MediaWiki software has been taking place for many years now. Lately it has gained all kinds of extra functionality that make the Translate extension it uses ready for the translation of texts. The latest work for instance is writing user help texts.

Siebrand announced a workshop targeted at developers. It may be the kind of workshop that other people are be interested in as well. Let us know if you have an interest..
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia Takes Ahmedabad

When seventy-five people turn up on a cold day, on a working day for a photo safari, it is safe to call it a success. It is wonderful to see not only pictures of  monuments, buildings but also things like the colourful mouth freshener they use in Ahmedabad to appear on Commons.

At this precise moment 606 images have been uploaded and many more are likely to be uploaded. It is of interest that all pictures have their description in English but it is possible to add translations to the descriptions.

{{Information|description={{en|1=Ahmedabad Mouth Freshener which people are fond to eat after lunch/dinner or after taking any meal}}{{nl|1=Een Ahmedabad mondverfrisser die mensen graag eten na een maaltijd.}} 

has the following as its result:

People can write a description in any language and have it translated to English or any other language. This is quite appropriate because it starts with having the material uploaded to Commons to make it available in one of 280+ languages we support.

I wonder if any of the pictures of this photo shoot will be considered as a featured picture candidate.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Workable code is not always deployable code

The #Wikimedia #Localisation team cranks out code, workable code - every sprint. At the end of the sprint, for us a sprint lasts a fortnight, all the completed "stories" are tested against their acceptance criteria and when the tests are good, they are signed off and marked as completed.

With this jargon out of the way, it is possible to consider features.

The Translate extension needs an additional feature to help translation administrators manage their work. Pages that have been marked for translation have a life-cycle; at the start they are marked for translation but at a later stage there is no longer a need for translation. Such a status change has an impact on what translators are to see.

There are many stories that make up the Translate status feature, for instance:

• you can watch the list
• you can change the status on a text
• the list is different depending on the role of a user and the status of a text

A sprint is run in a fixed amount of time. In a sprint there often are stories for multiple products. When the stories do not provide enough functionality for a feature, additional stories will make it in the next sprint. When you read this carefully, you may appreciate that "enough functionality" is not the same as "feature complete". The point is very much that with Agile we get feedback as soon as possible.

When you are interested in the stories in our current sprint, have a look in Mingle (user: guest - password: guest).

Thanks,

      GerardM

#Wikimedia highlights for October

Many people are eager to know how the Wikimedia Foundation is doing. Every month there is a long publication in English with everything you want and do not want to know. It can be translated, but it is considered too much of a burden on our translator community. In order to get the main message out anyway, there are highlights that are available for translation at Meta.

Once a translation is ready, the highlights can be referred to on the local village pumps of the projects for a language.

The latest Wikimedia highlights, the one for October, are looking for translators. When you make a request for translation, the translator should easily be guided to what needs doing. Two improvements to the original request have been implemented;

• When you click on the article link, you will see the text in the language you prefer
• When you click on the translate link, you will be shown the text fragments for your language

Meta is a multi-lingual project and it can be expected that people have set their user preferences to their mother tongue. When they do, we can provide them with translations when we have them.
Thanks,
     GerardM

To #Translate on #Wikimedia Meta

Providing adequate tools at Meta has been a holy grail for the developers of the Translate extension. To get to this stage a page translation mode was developed a long time ago. This has been in use successfully at KDE for the translation of its user documentation.

Having tools to manage texts that need translation is extremely valuable when the message can and does alter. This has always been the case for the Wikimedia Fundraiser and it was more or less managed with templates. The Translate extension brings the kind of functionality that cannot be managed with templates.

Making use of the Translate extension also unifies the skills needed for the translation and localisation of the fund raiser. One other and essential part of the fundraiser is the software that has always been localised at translatewiki.net.

At this time Translate has just been implemented and everybody is granted the privilege to translate. Only some people can enable a page for translation. As a consequence the only page currently available for translation is a test page explaining page translation.

It was important to get the software ready as soon as possible because the annual fundraiser is already quite near. Thanks to Niklas, Siebrand, Roan and Sam it has been realised. Testing at Meta materialised a final bug that will be fixed before Translate will be used in earnest.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#SVG maps that beg for a translation

The #Malayalam #Wikipedia Map project provides great maps. When you want to illustrate something to do with these Kerala districts, they provide the perfect canvas. It is a labour of love to make these maps and there is even more mileage that can be had with a slight change.

The slight change that would make these maps awesome is by making all the texts into separate labels. This provides several opportunities:

• you can translate the labels in other languages, to English for instance
• the maps will become usable on even more Wikipedias
• you can use the map without the labels as a canvas for other purposes

Once the names are available in labels, SVGtranslate  is ready to translate the updated SVG maps. SVGtranslate is one of the Toolserver tools that can be localised in Malayalam at translatewiki.net.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Lisa is insolvent - #Standards come at a cost

Lisa is an organisation involved in standards for the translation industry. In order to get an industry to accept standards, there is a need for an organisation that not only helps formulate standards but also promotes their use. Lisa organised worldwide conferences where standards and best practices were presented, promoted and defined.

With its insolvency an organisation that played its role in the definition of standards like TMX and TBX. Let's hope that they find a way to continue the good work.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Give us proper translation tools at #Wikimedia Meta

While #MediaWiki is excellent for writing encyclopaedic articles; it is not the right tool for all text jobs. We are asked to translate the Editor survey. It consists of a long list of short sentences, often repetitive. When translating these sentences, it would be useful to see the original text and existing translations to other languages. Add to this comments that make the context clear and the process of translation becomes easy and efficient.

The Translate extension developed for translating and localising at translatewiki.net provides all of these things in one convenient screen. Plain MediaWiki doesn't provide any of this and the translator has to laboriously move between screens.

Reviewing translated messages is a breeze with Translate. MediaWiki has this long list of translated questions which is very distracting. The Translate extension by comparison has a review mode that shows the translations juxtaposed with the original strings.

The Translate extension automatically offers translation for repeated sentences from its Translation Memory and automatic translations are suggested from Google and Microsoft. This is very efficient, but sadly MediaWiki doesn't have this either.

Modern browsers provide spell-checking functionality, which is very helpful for getting the translated text right. Mixing several languages in one editing box confuses the spell-checker and having a very long text in an editing box makes the spellchecker slow. With the Translate extension this is not a problem.

The Translate extension applies proper directionality to each language: Left-to-Right for English, Russian and Hindi; Right-to-Left for Hebrew, Arabic and Urdu. Translating using plain MediaWiki puts the original language - usually English - and the target language in one editing box and mixes up the directionality.

Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

Checking visually the #MediaWiki #localisation

Understanding #statistics takes a thousand words while pictures paint a thousand words. The continuous flood of new MediaWiki messages at translatewiki.net is met by our localisers with varying levels of success. The reality of a localisation is experienced best by looking at the screens involved.

There are two ways to do this. You can change the language in your preferences, this may leave you a bit disoriented trying to find the preferences again to change them to something sensible or, you can add ?uselang=xx at the end of the URL.

When you do this for the main page of translatewiki, you will not only see the user interface change but also the main page itself localised. Both are localised by the Translate extension and benefit from all the specialised functionality that help localisers be efficient and provide the statistics that are a big help when decisions need to be made.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Google #Translate for #Wikipedia please

Jean-Baptiste Noulet is credited as a pioneer of the study of human fossils of the prehistory. As Mr Noulet is French and it was in Toulouse where a gallery was opened in 1872 dedicated to finds from the prehistory. In 1882 a university chair was created dedicated to the study of the prehistory.

There is nothing to learn on the English Wikipedia on Mr Noulet. There is on the French Wikipedia and because of an exchange of e-mails on the subject of collaboration of the French chapter with GLAMs, I needed to learn more. I used Google translate by copying and pasting the text.

For the people who have difficulties reading my blog, I provide Google translate as a service. I would love Wikipedia to provide the same service.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Healthspeaks: Better health starts with better information!

About Healthspeaks

Many people google the Internet in preparation for their visit to the doctor. There is a wealth of information if you can find it. Being able to find it is a matter of training and in knowing languages like English, Dutch, German, French ..

With Wikipedia there is a similar situation. The Wikipedias that provide the best medical information are in languages where information is elsewhere also readily available.

Translating Wikipedia articles of high quality is definitely a great way of kick-starting the provision of health information in languages like Arabic, Hindi and Swahili. This does not mean that such articles will be perfect. The prevalence of many health issues is not evenly spread around the world, malaria and leprosy to name just two. The practices in the health sector are also very different. It is for this reason that it is so welcome that translators are urged not only to translate but also to localise the content.

It is icing on the cake that Healthspeaks offers a reward for every word translated to a local charity involved in health care. All in all, this looks like a well conceived project and I hope many people will register and make it a success.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Translating an historic text in #Batak

Sisingamangaraja XII is an official hero of #Indonesia. So much so that his face adorns the 1000 rupia bill. Original documents relevant to the struggle of the Batak at the beginning of the twentieth century are important and of historic relevance.

When I asked the Tropenmuseum for a text in the Batak script, it was our good luck that I received a really relevant document. The text is only two pages and it is adorned with the seal of the Raja on the first page.

In the document Sisingamangaraja insists that the Dutch colonial troops keep the peace in accordance to a letter of peace. From my perspective, using the official seal is a way of giving the letter gravitas. Having the text translated in Indonesian, Dutch or English without knowing the existence of the seal prevents a full appreciation of the document.

Top of the first page

When you look at the scan of the first page, you find an annotation in Dutch saying: "Inappropriate use of the seal". This I do not understand. Another thing I do not understand is why they gave Sisingamangaraja XII a beard; in the many photos of Bataks I have seen there was no male with a beard.

Kartika Henry asked me in if I could translate the Dutch translation into English. I have done my best but I am sure that it can be improved upon.

Translation of the letter by Si Singa Mangaradja
                 in the Royal Institute of the Tropics                                                                                          No. 687/73.

This is a letter of (our lord) Si Singa Mangaradja, who rules over the blackeyes (the Bataks), addressed to the "highest general", leader of the war for the Kompenie. The reason for this letter to be addressed to the "highest general" is this; I have heard, that you are warring at Sibagindar (?) and that you have taken my subjects prisoner, that is Si Rompis and Guru Mangabat it is said.
But I have received words of peace from the great lord of Medan and the great lord resident of Tapanuli and from the controller of Barus that the Kompenie will not wage war against me and those I rule.
I have also given this letter to the great lord resident of Medan and the great lord resident of Tapanuli and the controller of Barus, there is peace and that I will not war on the Kompenie awaiting the result of the meeting of the ambassadors of the Lord of Barus and the radja Hatorusan and the lord of Tunga, that the Kompenie me and those I govern will not engage in war, that the Kompenie will not trespass (what is not desired?) and now I say to the "highest general": Return, do not continue to wage war on me and those I rule, because in accordance with my letter to the great lord resident of Tapanuli and the controllers of Barus it is not permitted to the Kompenie to bother me and those I rule (with what is not wanted?)
Therefore: when the "highest general¨ and his troops do not return, the Kompenie is in breach of the words of peace and the agreement made by the great lord resident of Medan and the great lord resident of Tapanuli and the lord controler of Barus. This is why I say finally; when there are complaints about my subjects at Boang by you Kompenie, send your letter to me in Pakpak so that I can order an investigation and ensure that my subjects have no problems, therefore go away from here. If you do not leave, you will be in violation of the letter of peace who was given by the great lord resident of Tapanuli and the great lord resident of Medan and the lord controller of Barus. So be it.
        the month November 3th day - 1904

Thanks,
      GerardM