A more efficient translation interface

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De mica en mica s’omple la pica i de gota en gota s’omple la bota. —a Catalan proverb
During its most recent development sprint, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Engineering team continued to improve the user experience of the Translate extension to make it as smooth and efficient as possible. Highlights include:

  • Pressing the “Save” button immediately shows the next string to translate, while the saving is performed in the background.
  • When progressing to the next translation, the page smoothly scrolls up.
  • Explanations about translatable strings are shown beside the corresponding message in a convenient box, which becomes expandable if the documentation is too long.
  • Machine Translation was made available for suggested translations.
  • The differences between older versions of translatable strings are also shown in a new expandable box.
  • The Language Selector API was updated to allow displaying all the documentation strings.
  • The Solr search engine schema was tweaked to make searching translatable strings more efficient and feature-rich by offering faceted search.

Below is a brief demo of the latest features of the translation editor in action. You can see translating the Etherpad Lite project into Russian there.

The Language team also continues to work on squashing bugs and adding prioritized features. You can check out the latest bleeding edge version of the translation editor on translatewiki.net, or go back to the stable translation editor. Please report Translate bugs in Bugzilla.
Amir E. Aharoni, Software Engineer (Internationalization)

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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I love the Catalan proverb 😉

Very nice, great job guys! Just a suggestion I think the translation box shouldn’t suddenly jump to the next line and then slide up with it. That movement is very unintuitive and makes the interface seem a little jerky. I think an easy solution would be to just not slide the list automatically. Mouse wheels, scrollbars and direction keys make that job quite effortless for the user. Or maybe keep the box in place and slide only the list.