Last modified: 2012-04-16 09:15:57 UTC
The translations of MediaWiki messages for many languages are not complete. When the translation is not complete, messages are displayed in the fallback language (often English), in the same font, same color and same size. If the user knows the fallback language well, he may hardly notice this, although he is the one who can translate the message. It's possible to encourage users to complete the translation. One way to do it is to put a link saying something like "translate this message" near every untranslated message. The link should point directly to the message page in translatewiki.net, the de-facto MediaWiki translation website. Yes, this will put a lot of those links on the wiki and this may be ugly, but the users can get rid of them by completing the translation, which they should do anyway. This link must be also displayed for outdated or broken ("!!FUZZY!!") messages, and for extensions messages and not just the core. This is not just a way to encourage people to complete their translations. It will be actually easier to translate the software this way, because then the message is seen in context and not in a dry list of strings, as it is in TranslateWiki now. One problem with this approach is that the translation is not updated immediately. It's not terrible, because the way things work now, it will be updated after a few days, but if someone has a clever way to fix that, it would be nice. Another problem is text in special areas such as buttons, links and input box boilerplate (for example, the word "Search" in the Vector search box). But that can be handled somehow. People who like to improve translation may also get the opportunity to enable such a link for all messages, even translated ones. Something like this exists on Facebook; it sucks there, but who said we can't do better?
Retitling this bug. An extension to do this makes some sense. After that extension is written, adding it to MediaWiki installations (and actually doing the invitation) is a separate step.
Been there, tried that and failed. It's impossible to have a "translate this" link in every message (think about configuration messages like sidebar, items on dropdowns, link titles...). Heck, we can't even tell if we got the real translation or some fallback when outputting text. Imho the best thing we can do is keeping message documentation adequate, even it means bugging developers more. There should also be an easy way to make standard looking screenshots with translatable messages highlighted and linked.
I hate to mention the dreaded f word (*cough*facebook*cough*) but their setup for inline translations has a lot going for it from the translator point of view. It has exactly this functionality: on any message, translated or not, you can click and be given the opportunity to vote the translation up or down, retranslate, comment, submit a first translation, etc. etc. Obviously we would start small: first pass = send the user to translatewiki to the page for the message. But once that basic functionality were in place we could think about other features.
I agree with Niklas that having 'translate this' everywhere would not probably work. I don't know the f solution, but looks interesting. I work in Polish, where translation coverage is very good, so I have little chance to see an untranslated message even in the obscure corners. However, I am very often in need to change the translation, since many of them are (out of necessity) made out of context of the application workflow. Most of the time I spend checking site's JavaScripts, gadgets and grepping the Mediawiki source to find the answer "where is this (...) message coming from". It is not very easy to find the message on translatewiki if I only know the wording. The problem is not only concerning special page aliases or namespaces, but also some more complex messages. In bug 26463, I couldn't figure it out despite having MediaWiki source and message translations from translatewiki.
(In reply to comment #4) > I work in Polish, where translation coverage is very good, so I have little > chance to see an untranslated message even in the obscure corners. However, I > am very often in need to change the translation, since many of them are (out of > necessity) made out of context of the application workflow. Most of the time I > spend checking site's JavaScripts, gadgets and grepping the Mediawiki source to > find the answer "where is this (...) message coming from". It is not very easy > to find the message on translatewiki if I only know the wording. > That's covered by bug 15802, really.
Niklas and I discussed this; we do not see any possibilities to properly and centrally implement this. It would take a huge effort and even then we do not see how it could be perfect with MediaWiki's flexibility as it currently is. We're closing this WONTFIX.
