I18n

How to configure Ubuntu 14.04 for typing in Malayalam

Also see Swanalekha input method documentation

I am a mentor for Google Summer of Code 2014 for SMC. I will be helping Praveen Sridhar to port input methods from jquery.ime to the Firefox OS. We started the project and Praveen already has a proof of concept ready. Tim Chien and Rudy Lu from Mozilla is co-mentoring the same project

English and many other languages have only 2 plural forms. Singular if the count is one and anything else is plural including zero. But for some other languages, the plural forms are more than 2. Arabic, for example has 6 plural forms, sometimes referred as ‘zero’, ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘few’, ‘many’, ‘other’ forms. Integers 11-26, 111, 1011 are of ‘many’ form, while 3,4,..10 are ‘few’ form. While preparing the interface messages for application user interfaces, grammatically correct sentences are must. “Found 1 results” or “Found 1 result(s)” are bad interface messages. For a developer, if the language in the context is English or languages having similar plural forms, it may be a matter of an if condition to conditionally choose one of the messages. ...

Browsers provide an option to choose the preferred language a website to be shown, often named as “Accept language“. [][2]Firefox accept language preference These preference values allows websites to deliver a suitable language version to the user. For the developers, to read this value, the existing options is to check the Accept-Language http header value. It works and many websites use it already. But this value was never exposed at client side. Javascript cannot access the value of these preferences. There are many use cases where this is preferred. Handling i18n at client side is one of this. ...

I will be speaking at the upcoming W3C workshop at Madrid. The workshop is on 7-8 May 2014 and the theme is “New Horizons for the Multilingual Web”. I will be co-presenting with Pau Giner, David Chan from Wikimedia Foundation Language engineering team on best practices of translation at wikipedia. It will cover the design (from both technical and user experience perspectives) of the translation tools, and their expected impact on Wikipedia and the Web as a whole.

Mediawiki is moving from PHP array based localisation file format to json format. This is based on the RFC: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Localisation_format A lot of extensions were also migrated to the new localisation format, thanks to Siebrand Mazeland The json based localization file format was first introduced in our frontend javascript i18n library https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.i18n If you are interested in seeing some of the sample json files see https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/122787/ , claimed as “largest patch set in the history of MediaWiki” ...