Internationalization

UI and doc translation

• translatewiki.net
• mediawiki is really insane, but it's also really exciting. you can edit the content strings on the site itself.
• http://translatewiki.net: centralized wiki where all translators can organize themselves. detects which new strings are available, what's changed, etc.
• mediawiki extension, works with gettext based systems and mozilla's system
• has an existing community of translators who are interested in helping out with other projects.
• semi-automated: pulls new strings from git repo, and then pushes them back every couple of days.
• no support for 112n and plugins yet. brion is working on that right now. Format: _("Some text.")
• Gets harder when you have 10 pieces of software all in the same space (.e.g plugins). Has created a context wrapper which helps the system know whose string is being translated. Wrapper function: _m("Plugin text."; M is for "message."
• Limitation: it will only be picked up if the plugin is maintained in the same git repo. Take advantage of git branching to help automate if people want to maintain upstream plugin translations.
• Going to be using doxygen to build a developer Web site. using the same for event hooks and config options (for sys admins).
• Need to i18n code references too. pull the README into the wiki as well.
• Typically: systems work well for offline or online editing. ONLY offline editing is awkward. Online editing is easiest to start with, but as soon as you start doing more, you tend to switch to offline.
• We can do unicode, but we need to do a code audit to make sure it's all working consistently.

Language tagging and translation

• google wave translate; twitter translate it's actually pretty good because it's so short.
• not looking for perfect translation, just a suggestion of wha'ts going on.
• is twitter using gogole's translation engine?
• google's translate allows you to suggest alternative translations if you disagree with their translations.
• add metadata about the hashtag to help with translation. which ultimately makes it more findable.
• suggestion: mass collab service to human translate tags (used with wikipedia for auto suggestions)
• ability to tag by language. e.g. lang:fr. meta data for microblogging. don't add this to the actual status update though. Could set a default language but if you do multiple languages, it's harder to deal with.
• autotagging for language is difficult because the updates are so short.
• It's unreasonable to expect people to always say which language they're posting in. But if the user could set a few defaults, it might be easier for the machine translation to guess. "What languages do you speak?" search results only post in the languages tyou speak OR to be really crazy you could google translate things that aren't in your chosen languages.

Overriding language detection

• autodetection on languages needs to be really obvious on how to switch to another language.
• language detection: show a picture of an apple and ask them to type the word in the language they speak
• need a standard for people who do want to tag their updates according to language.
• important to have a clear way to override for any guess system in case we guess wrong.