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.
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W3C Workshop at Madrid
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.
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Mediawiki moves to json based localisation file format
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”