AnneW's world

As many of you know, Translatewiki is a Mediawiki extension, used by UserBase.  Today’s newsletter announces its 6th birthday!

We are 6 years young!

Translatewiki.net was started as a small addition to a test wiki of NiklasLaxström. First the project became known as Betawiki until it matured andbecame translatewiki.net. We are grateful that our project is hosted forfree and given room to grow by netcup.de <http://netcup.de> . The platformnow supports localisation for 20 free and open source projects with almost1,000 message groups, has 2,500 translators in over 200 languages. Its usershave made over 3 million edits and contributed close to 2 milliontranslations for Free and Open Source Software products. According to thes23 statistics, translatewiki.net is one of the largest independentMediaWiki installations around.

Impressive indeed!  What’s more, ??Niklas Laxström gives freely of his help and advice.  Many of you will know him as Nikerabbit, on IRC, and others will remember Niklas and Siebrand Mazeland from Akademy 2010.

Congratulations to the Translatewiki team – keep up the good work 🙂   See you at the WebWorld sprint, Niklas.

I promised to nag you about UserBase, and here we are, already in April, and I haven’t said a word. Yet.

New content on UserBase is still slow to arrive, but we’ll talk about that another day. Today I’m looking at the position on translations.

If you haven’t looked lately, you will be surprised to hear that our landing page, Welcome_to_KDE_UserBase, is already translated into 30 languages. Sadly, I can’t say the same about any other page. Still, it’s not all gloom – there is some nice news too. Following the suggestion of a member of our localisation team, we have begun the creation of Translation Teams. This is in the very early stages, but the idea is that Team Leaders will keep an eye on any work done in their language, and provide any guidelines that are language-specific, so that a standard can be maintained. So far we have nine volunteers (some, army-style volunteered, I’ll admit 🙂 ) and although their teams are very small at the moment, we hope to make more people active in this field. 131 people have registered to do some translation, so there is plenty of room for growth in output.

We now have 392 pages within the translation system. Let’s see how some of the languages are faring. These statistics reflect the number of pages that are wholly or partly translated to the language.

Top of the league are Ukrainian and Danish, with all 392 pages translated. Yurchor and Claus_chr have been working hard for us since we first launched the system, and deserve a medal each. After that, there are:

Italian 297
Spanish 255
Chinese (China) 183
Taiwanese 155
German 144
French 117
Russian 108
Catalan 92
Brazilian Portuguese 86
Dutch 64
Romanian 59
Turkish 40
Japanese 32
Indonesian 31
Polish 28
Rusyn 21
Portuguese 20
Swedish 18
Galician 17
Czech 15
Finnish 14
Simplified Chinese 8
Korean 3
Bosnian 3
Esperanto 2
Hungarian 1
Slovak 1

Surprised at some of these numbers? I was.  Pleasingly, I’m seeing good growth in Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Taiwanese (one man doing both language variants) and Catalan, but some of the other languages are surprisingly slow.

As always, if you have questions about helping, join us on IRC, #kde-www, or simply leave a message for me on my UserBase Talk page.