Project:News/Newsletter 2013-01

This month's subject: Translation is user experience

Hello, dear friend.

This is the http://translatewiki.net e-mail newsletter for January 2013. This month we'd like to share the impact your work has. We hope it inspires you to reinvigorate your efforts at translatewiki.net. Further down, you can also read about the excellent result of the end of year Translation Rally.

Thank you for supporting translatewiki.net through 2012. The success of open source software localisation relies on your continued involvement and enthusiasm. Please try and dedicate 15 minutes a week – preferably do more and bring your friends! – to updating and reviewing translations for your favourite project.

Great software deserves great translation
There is a world where Harry Potter’s arch enemy is "Du-weißt-schon-wer," Facebook users click the “Me gusta” button, and the Dude is named “le Duc.” This world is a translated world.

I read a great blog post last weekend. I'm sharing my summary of it with you. It's copyrighted, so I have to restrain myself and only cite part of it, and summarize the rest. I hope it makes you want to make your favourite free and open source software available in your language. Now!

The blog post makes the case that software is often carefully designed and care is taken to the minutest of details. Even the use of small screens is being anticipated, by developing mobile first. But wait... In this global world of "Du-weißt-schon-wer" and "le Duc", where roughly 73% of the internet users do not speak English, what would "foreign first" do for multi language awareness of our developers? At translatewiki.net we cherish "translate early, translate often" as a variant to "release early, release often". It ensures that you, translator, are able to encounter user interface messages for new features in software as early in the development cycle as possible, so that you can report problems very early in the development cycle. At first glance this may seem a waste of time, but actually it isn't. The sooner problems are spotted and repaired, the lower the cost to fix. We love that you are part of the development team. Feed us with your knowledge and questions by hitting the "Ask question" button when you're translating and something seems odd. We will try to respond as quickly as possible.

Translation Rally December 2012: Excellent achievement
The Translation Rally of December 2012 was a huge success. This rally was sponsored by Wikimedia Nederland, the Dutch Wikimedia chapter. We are very grateful for their wonderful continued support as well as the huge effort all the translators made during the last few days of 2012!

172 translators made over 50,000 new in-scope translations during 10 days of rally for 112 languages. 54 contributors qualified for a cut of the 1,000 € bounty. For those interested, all details are available. Compared to the Translation Rally of December 2011, 6,000 more translations (+13%) were made and 16 more users shared in the bounty (+42%).

Changes in supported products
Since the last newsletter, support for was added for 19 new MediaWiki extensions, and support for many other products was updated. More detailed news can be found on our News page.

Behind the scenes
The website had an uptime of 99.5% in December 2012. At the moment we are working on installing and configuring Apache Solr, for the translation platform's latest search features, with facets and all. However, we're hitting a problem: The Java application server somehow will not bind to our local loopback interface. If you can help out, please let us know. We'd gladly allow you to troubleshoot with us!

If you are a developer of a promising Free or Open Source Software product and you are looking for a great community to localise your product, please get in touch with us! The same goes for those that wish to aid in developing the Translate extension further.

Follow translatewiki on Twitter for the latest news.

Finally, if you are not a translator yet, please complete the steps that will get you the status of translatewiki.net translator and allow you to be a localisation hero!

We welcome feedback about this newsletter. Please let us know by sending a reply to this mail. We will try to accommodate your wishes.

Siebrand Mazeland

translatewiki.net staff

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