Pune LanguageSummit February 2013/Event Report

Accomplishments from the Open Source Language Summit - Spring 2013, Pune, India and areas to follow-up:

Input Methods

Completed

Parag Nemade and Santhosh Thottingal worked on making additional input methods available for the jQuery.ime library. 60 input methods, covering languages like Assamese, Esperanto, Russian, Greek, Hebrew were added bringing the total to 144. Also IMEs from the m17n library missing from the jQuery.ime library were identified. Yuvi Panda worked on completing the jQuery.ime port to the Android platform and announced its release.

Follow up

Add more keymaps for increasing the language coverage.

Translation Tools, translatewiki.net & FUEL Sprint

The focus for this sprint was to identify and analyze tools that could be used as Translation aids. The FUEL project was extensively discussed for inclusion into translatewiki.net. The FUEL project aims to standardize translations for frequently used terms, translation style and assessment methodology. Until now it has focused mostly on languages of India, but it aims to cover as many languages as possible. The translated FUEL terms for a language are considered ready for adoption after they are evaluated by a diverse group of language speakers during a face to face meeting which may take up to 2 days.

Completed

After evaluation by Siebrand Mazeland, the source content for the modules for desktop, mobile and web applications from the FUEL project has now been included into translatewiki.net and can be translated into more languages. Pau Giner demonstrated the new Translation Editor and the designs for terminology usage, remotely from Spain, and these were discussed.

Follow up

1. For new languages, a document detailing the entire process will be prepared by the FUEL community.
2. Red Hat will improve of documentation of existing FUEL terms based on Siebrand's analysis, so that it will be easier to translate them correctly.
3. Creation of the development branches on a git repository with easier access.
4. Three new modules for Numbers, Colors and Date & Time.
5. Update the design for using the FUEL terms as a translation aid in the Translate extension according to the discussions.

Language Coverage Matrix

With 285 languages currently supported in Wikimedia and more than 100 in Fedora, this document will be beneficial in bridging gaps and enabling porting features across projects and platform.

Completed

To better evaluate needs for enabling support for languages, a preliminary draft matrix detailing requirements and availability of basic and extended features like input methods, fonts, translation aids like glossaries and spell-checkers, testing and validation methods etc. was drawn up during the summit by Alolita Sharma, Runa Bhattacharjee and Amir Aharoni.

Follow up

Identify and document the significant gaps in the features between the languages supported (or currently incubated) in Wikimedia Projects and Fedora

Fonts and Web-Fonts

A collaborative initiative to document the technical aspects of fonts for Indian scripts started during the language summit, through which reference fonts will be chosen and described using the Open Type font specification as a standard. For each of the scripts, reference fonts will be chosen from the existing fonts and each font will be explained in detail to intersect with the Open Type font specification as a standard.

Completed

An initial draft and outline of this document was prepared on the second day of the language summit, mainly by Santhosh Thottingal (WMF) and Pravin Satpute (Red Hat). Aravinda VK and Praveen A reviewed the specifications and the Malayalam font details respectively in the document. Following discussions during the Language Summit, Pravin Satpute announced the availability of Lohit web-fonts.

Follow up

This document will be collaboratively prepared by editors from each language and so that it can be built as a reference document for any typographer working on Indian language fonts. After designing the glyphs, font developers can export the feature files to make the font technically correct and compatible with the standards.

Testing Internationalization Tools

Finding suitable methods of testing internationalized components and contents was the major focus of this sprint, with the Fedora Localization Testing Group (FLTG) team and the WMF Language Engineering team sharing details of the testing methods followed by them. While the FLTG conducts test days prior to Fedora beta releases with a test matrix set targeted at specific core components, the WMF Language team uses unit tests for frequent testing of their development features.

Completed

Fedora FLTG team and the WMF Language Engineering team shared details of the testing methods followed by them.

The FLTG showed its plan to integrate the visual comparison method (PDF, ODT) of testing localized interfaces using screenshots. This can go a long way in helping the testers of any open source project in easily doing their work easily. Extending the test cases/matrix for web-based applications and language requirements (e.g. right-to-left) were identified as possible areas for collaboration between Wikimedia and FLTG.

Follow up

Evaluate and identify the components from the FLTG testing matrix and adopt suitable parts of the matrix creation process for the i18n testing method used by the WMF language engineering team.

Other Accomplishments

1. Soumya Deb fixed a bug in the jQuery.ime library that earlier allowed input methods with the beta tag to also be loaded. Sucheta Ghoshal contributed by writing the names of the input methods in the respective languages for a uniform representation on the Universal Language Selector screen.

2. Amir E. Aharoni and Anish Patil worked on creating a proof-of-concept for a MediaWiki API for spell checking words in different languages. Followup: adding multilingual spell-checking support to MediaWiki editing pages and for maintaining spelling dictionaries.

3. Outreach Program for Women (OPW) participants Sucheta Ghoshal and Priyanka Nag presented updates about their respective projects. Working face-to-face with Wikimedia engineers helped move their projects forward.

4. Highlights from the lightning talks include a presentation by Yuvi Panda on java-morelangs, the jQuery.ime port to the Android platform. Also was a presentation by Runa Bhattacharjee about the new visual testing tool Deckard, that has been developed for gtk+ applications.