Translating:KDE/Documentation

KDE
KDE is an international technology team that creates Free Software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE's products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. KDE4's full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X. From kde.org.

KDE documentation project
Over the past two years KDE software has changed so rapidly that documentation has been left behind. Traditionally it has been written in DocBook format, and few developers are comfortable with that. Nevertheless, core documentation team still needs to be able to use it. At the same time, language translation is very spotty - with some languages being well supported and other languages only minimally. KDE documentation project aims to allow documentation writers and translators to work with their tool of choice, on- or off-line, and to make it simple to convert documentation between wiki, html and traditional DocBook formats.

Translatewiki.net
Translatewiki.net (formerly Betawiki, henceforth referred to as twn) is a people-oriented translation platform specialised in key-based localisation formats for web applications and more. Twn was started for translating Mediawiki, the popular wiki engine best known from Wikimedia projects. Since then many projects have chosen twn as the preferred translation platform. Similar projects are Launchpad and the translation project.

Translate extension
The tool (or tool arsenal) that powers twn is an extension to MediaWiki and open source software. Lately it has gained experimental support for translating content (wiki) pages in addition to just software localisation.

Introduction
MediaWiki is the wiki software used by KDE documentation project for collaborative document creation. This wiki is called UserBase. It also happens that MediaWiki itself is inadequate for handling translation of the content. There are no tools to help the work and give structure for the process. Without any tools the process is not scalable. There will be problems keeping translation up to date, propagating changes to translated versions and it will be hard to follow how translations are progressing.

The Translate extension developed for the use of twn provides good match for the use case. It splits long pages into small manageable tranlation units. It tracks changes in the translation unit level. It also keeps track to which languages a page is translated and how well. Filtering translation edits in the list of recent changes is possible.

People
Programmers with PHP skills are needed for accomodating the Translate extensions for UserBase needs. Available is Nikerabbit (from twn) when he has some free time and neverendingo (from KDE).

Marketing people are needed to announce and advertise the end result.

Testers are needed for finding bugs and testing the work-flow.

System administrators are needed to set-up test wikies and handle the final deployment and updating it.

Software
The Translate extensions need MediaWiki 1.16, which is not released.

Hardware
KDE project will handle necessary hardware.

Schedule

 * MediaWiki 1.16 must be released first

Critical path


Time is specified in days. Worst case scenario assumes a lot of foot-dragging.

Risk evaluation

 * MW delay
 * functionality
 * schedule
 * integration success
 * suitability for the project