Wiki-translation discussion

GerardM wrote:
> Hoi,
> I spend a considerable amount of time on the translation website. I found it stated that it
> intends to do something for any wiki platform. I find however that only one wiki engine is
> promoted while much of the functionality discussed is to be developed. What I have not found is
> why this wiki engine is to be used. I do not find why other engines cannot do the same thing.

You may want to look at this page:

http://www.wiki-translation.com/tiki-index.php?page=Cross+Lingual+Wiki+Engine+Project+Proposal&highlight=proposal

which provides a broad vision of the project (BTW: I thought this page was visible from the main page for the CLWE project, but I now realize that it wasn't, because of an apparent bug in the bleeding edge version of Tiki which we are using on this site).

Anyways, the proposal says:

> Our aim is to develop and evaluate processes and tools that can be used with any wiki engine.
> However, we will use TikiWiki as our initial development platform. Once we have figured out how to
> enable translation the wiki-way inside of TikiWiki, other wiki engines will be able to follow suit
> by emulating what we have done.

Why did we choose TikiWiki for the first implementation? Simply put, there was a strong core of 5 TikiWiki developers interested in doing it, so we went with that. If you know of a community of MediaWiki developers who would be interested in participating, we'd love to have them in the project. I'm sure we would learn a lot by concurrently building translation support in two wiki engines instead of just one.

Speaking of MediaWiki, I am surprised to hear you say that

> I think that several of the things you discuss are done in MediaWiki already so I am left with
> the question WHY ?

Having done a bit of translation with MediaWiki 12 months or so ago, I know that it has *some* of the features we are working on. But overall, it's lacking a lot of features to make translation fluid and easy. For examples, if I look at the following page:

http://www.wiki-translation.com/Function+Group+B%3A+Minimal+useful+version&bl=y

I see several use cases which we have implemented, that MediaWiki does not support well. Some of them are supported, but involve lots of tedious manipulations by the end user. In contrast, we support single-click types of solutions to those use cases.

• When a Site Visitor looks at a page in his preferred language, he will need to Assess up to dateness of a Particular Language Version of a Page and also, Choose a Language Version that User can Read and that is Reasonably Up to Date.

• When a Page Translator creates the initial translation of a page in a given language, the system now helps him Translate a Page from Pasted Source Content.

• When a Page Translator creates the initial translation of a page in a given language, the system now helps him Tagging a Page as Being Under Translation.

• At some point, a Page Author might Modify a Page That Has a Translation.

• At some later point, a Page Translator will need to Translate a Change from One Language to Another, and when the two pages are in synch, Tag two Language Versions as being in Synch.

• A Page Translator applies the changes to a translation based on changes since the last translation.

• A Page Author identifies a critical error in the content of a page and want to make sure it is clear the content of the page and all affected translations may contain errors.

Rick Sapir is working on a video to show these features in action. Maybe it will become clearer when we post it.

Note that those are just the use cases we have implemented so far. On the same page, there are other use cases that we plan to implement soon, which are not supported by MediaWiki:

• At some point, a Page Author may Create a Page by Clicking on a Dangling Link, and the system will make sure that the author knows whether to create the page from scratch or translate it from an existing page. Ask Alain for details.

• When creating a brand new translation, system helps user Translate a Hyperlink.

• A Page Translator or Site Visitor Ask for Notification of Changes to ANY Language Version of a Page.

Looking even further into the future:

http://www.wiki-translation.com/Function+Group+C%3A+Reading+and+translating+from+unfamiliar+languages&bl=y

we are planning features that will help users translate from say, Chinese to English, even if they can't read Chinese.

I hope this clarifies things for you Gerard.


Alain Desilets

When you go to Betawiki, you will find the main page in English. When you change the language to Dutch it will be in Dutch. Betawiki is primaraly used for the localisation of MediaWiki and as such is a success.

Nikerabbit has a Finnish summer of code project approved, so we are going to improve the Betawiki functionality considerably. This include the idea of using translation memory for the translation/localisation effort.

Having developer interested in this wiki engine is a valid one.. you scratch your own itch..
Thanks,
Gerard