IRC office hours/Office hours 2014-10-15

Language Engineering

Log

Time: 17:00-18:00 UTC

Channel: #wikimedia-office

Timestamps are in UTC.

00:09 <arrbee> #startmeeting Language Engineering monthly office hour - October 2014

00:09 <wm-labs-meetbot> Meeting started Wed Oct 15 17:00:09 2014 UTC and is due to finish in 60 minutes.  The chair is arrbee. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.

00:09 <wm-labs-meetbot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic #startvote.

00:09 <wm-labs-meetbot> The meeting name has been set to 'language_engineering_monthly_office_hour___october_2014'

00:26 <arrbee> Hello everyone

00:32 <arrbee> Welcome to the monthly office hour of the Wikimedia Language Engineering team

01:01 * arrbee is Runa, the Outreach co-ordinator for our team

01:21 <arrbee> Our office hours are held every 2nd Wednesday of the month

01:43 <arrbee> We delayed by a week this month due to the holiday season in India

02:07 <arrbee> Our last office hour was held on September 10th, 2014. The logs are at:

02:15 <arrbee> #link https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2014-09-10

02:49 <Niharika> o/

02:59 <arrbee> Before we begin, please be aware that the chat will be logged and posted on a publicly accessible wiki

03:08 <arrbee> Hey Niharika .. good to see you

03:23 <Niharika> Good to see you too, arrbee! :)

03:25 <arrbee> A quick introduction of the team

04:12 <arrbee> We are the Wikimedia Language Engineering team. Besides me, present today are aharoni kart_ jsahleen Nikerabbit divec santhosh pginer

04:53 <arrbee> We build and maintain language features and tools for the wikis in more than 300 languages and support the wiki communities around the world

05:34 <arrbee> Our team page on mediawiki.org has details about the projects we work on and how you can participate in them:

05:37 <arrbee> #link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering

06:38 <arrbee> Since our last office hour, we have continued work on Content Translation and also made updates to CLDR and Translate

07:13 <arrbee> For Content Translation, we completed the 2nd release last month

07:39 <arrbee> September 30th to be precise

07:46 <arrbee> The first was the MVP release earlier in July

08:04 <arrbee> The announcement for the new version can be found at:

08:22 <arrbee> #link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Announcement-October2014

09:16 <arrbee> However, due to technical difficulties with the setup on beta-labs the updated code is not yet available for wider testing and use

09:42 <arrbee> We hope to sort out the problems very soon

10:10 <arrbee> kart_ has been actively working with the Ops team on this

10:46 <arrbee> particulaly with akosiaris. Thanks a lot for the help.

11:11 <kart_> \0

11:36 <arrbee> Meanwhile we have already started working on the features for the next version, which is scheduled for release on November 18

12:10 <arrbee> In the latest version we have introduced a basic formatting toolbar for Google Chrome

12:28 <arrbee> We have also activated bidirectional machine translation for Spanish and Portuguese

13:11 <arrbee> However, due to the blocker in the labs setup, users will have to wait for some more time to use these 2 languages reliably

13:53 <arrbee> santhosh: would you like to talk a bit about the other features and the new features planned for the next release?

14:38 <santhosh> We were working on improving the performance and polishing the existing features

14:46 <santhosh> We worked on several infrastructure components.

14:59 <santhosh> Overall it should improve the responsiveness of the tools.

15:10 <santhosh> We are adding  automatic category adaptation feature now.

15:27 <santhosh> We will soon start work on a translation dashboard

16:18 <Romaine> is there any plan yet to add other languages?

16:48 <arrbee> Romaine: yes. Unfortunately, we are blocked on the lab setup.

16:55 <santhosh> And some early prepartion for allowing a translator to save and resume later -probably by another translator

17:10 <arrbee> Romaine: we will begin testing more language pairs for machine translation support

17:44 <Romaine> I hope Dutch can be such language

18:16 <Romaine> I have had the opportunity to extensive test another translating tool earlier and I am veru much looking forward to this tool

18:34 <santhosh> Romaine: once we prepare our infrastructure - that is what we are slightly blocked, we should be able to focus on increasing language coverage

18:59 <santhosh> we will evaluate more language pairs

19:17 <Romaine> in what time frame you expect such to be happen?

20:15 <santhosh> by the end of this month we are expecting our infrastructure issues resoved. We have to deploy the current language pair- Spanish-catalan to production then

20:30 <santhosh> Also open up catalan->spanish.

21:10 <santhosh> The next candidate language we have is Portuguese-spanish

21:24 <santhosh> Mainly because we use Apertium MT.

22:04 <santhosh> We will evaluate all language pairs we can support with Apertium first.

22:39 <arrbee> Romaine: we hope to have reliable testing infrastructure (not beta) to be ready for preliminary testing of more language pairs before the end of this month

23:04 <santhosh> Romaine: You are interested in English-Dutch?

23:20 <Romaine> yes

23:33 <Romaine> German-Dutch orFrench-Dutch is fine as well

23:47 <arrbee> all 3 seem to be in Apertium incubator

23:56 <arrbee> Apertium supports Afrikaans and Dutch as a pair.

24:14 <arrbee> Romaine: have you ever tried this pair?

24:40 <Romaine> I was trying to but maybe I did not understand the tool

25:20 <arrbee> on apertium.org?

26:18 <Romaine> not there, apparantly I should have

26:49 <Romaine> (in earlier years I have tested the translate tool https://nl.wikimedia.org/wiki/CoSyne , but that is a totally different project I think)

27:49 <Romaine> in apertium.org I can only select a language and translate to Portguease, Catalan or Spanish

28:41 <arrbee> Romaine: I can select Dutch-Afrikaans at http://www.apertium.org/index.eng.html#translation

28:54 <arrbee> and the other way around

29:10 <Romaine> yes, that is the only option together with Dutch

29:14 <aharoni|mobile> CoSyne is a pretty cool project, but AFAIK it's more about comparing current language versions of articles (but it's possible that I don't remember correctly)

29:31 <arrbee> Romaine: are you familiar with Afrikaans?

29:39 <Romaine> I can read Afrikaans

29:47 <arrbee> oh nice

29:51 <Romaine> people in the Netherlands can pretty well understand it

30:03 <aharoni|mobile> Apertium are very keen about releasing pairs that they are sure about.

30:18 <arrbee> Romaine: if you do get the time to check out the pair, we would be very interested to hear what you think of the translation

30:31 <Romaine> sure I can test

30:33 <aharoni|mobile> So it may work only in one direction for some languages.

30:54 <arrbee> Romaine: Thanks a lot.

31:24 <Romaine> is there a place where I can report/discuss the things I notice?

31:33 <aharoni|mobile> And yes, please test Afrikaans and tell us what do you think about it'd quality. Such feedback is very important to us.

31:54 <Romaine> where should I post/send/etc the feedback?

32:00 <arrbee> Romaine: ContentTranslation project talk page, bugzilla, #mediawiki-i18n, direct emails to any of us

32:07 <arrbee> all work

32:16 <Romaine> I will find one :)

32:32 <arrbee> #link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Content_translation

32:35 <arrbee> Romaine: ^^

32:51 <Romaine> personally I would have expected German-Dutch as well, bot languages are very similar to each other

33:10 <arrbee> Its in the incubator

33:43 <aharoni|mobile> Or Dutch-Frisian :)

33:51 <arrbee> It would have been desirable to have that pair, and some others ready in production :)

34:10 <Romaine> or Norwegion bokmal-Dutch

35:30 <Romaine> (CoSyne is a tool to compare current language versions of articles but also about translating articles)

35:58 <Romaine> if more of these languages come available I am happy yto test it

36:09 <arrbee> Thanks a lot :)

37:00 <arrbee> pginer has been testing the Spanish-Portuguese & Portuguese-Spanish translations with users

37:14 <Romaine> I can organise such for Dutch

37:48 <arrbee> Romaine: I will make sure we get in touch with you once we have some clarity on the infrastructure setup

37:56 <Romaine> :)

38:52 <arrbee> Meanwhile, you may have noticed the message on the Portuguese Village Pump for Content Translation testing

39:02 <arrbee> #link http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Esplanada/an%C3%BAncios#Try_Portuguese_support_for_Content_Translation

39:32 <arrbee> In other news

40:10 <arrbee> santhosh has also been working on updating the plural forms in mediawiki i18n as per the latest CLDR 26 release

40:28 <arrbee> This primarily affects a few languages including Russian

40:59 <arrbee> We are working on determining a timeline for implementation of this change and also reach out to the affected language communities to verify the change in content

41:29 <arrbee> Nikerabbit: would you like to add something about this?

42:34 <Scott_WUaS> Greetings

42:37 <Nikerabbit> yep

42:56 <Nikerabbit> it is quite complicated since we need to update the rules and translations simultaneously

43:09 * Romaine filled in the form in the pt: In other news section

43:16 <arrbee> Scott_WUaS: Hello.. I was hoping you would drop by

43:36 <Nikerabbit> we will be coordinating with various people to get these changes out in a way that causes minimal breakage

44:19 <Nikerabbit> as a user you do not need to do anything. if you are a translators, we will need your help to verify and update translations as needed

44:56 <arrbee> Thanks Nikerabbit

45:24 <Scott_WUaS> Hi Arrbee ... how are you ... looking forward to participating in the remaining 15 minutes or so.

45:48 <arrbee> We will be announcing the when we have more clarity on the timeline for the CLDR work

45:57 <arrbee> Scott_WUaS: Unfortunately, I could not get any more information about the interwiki projects and wikidata, that you had mentioned.

46:25 <arrbee> Scott_WUaS: I was hoping someone from Wikidata may be able to help with it

47:04 <arrbee> Timecheck: just under 15 minutes

47:10 <arrbee> remain

48:08 <Scott_WUaS> Thank you for checking, arrbee ... I've begun contributing to Wikidata weekly summaries ... and there do appear to be a number of external sister wiki projects that also engage Wikicommons - I think - possibly wikidata listing all genes, for example. Is someone here from Wikidata who might be able to add to this?

48:47 <Scott_WUaS> * external sister wikidata projects

48:48 * arrbee spots dennyvrandecic

49:03 <arrbee> and Lydia_WMDE of course

50:17 <arrbee> Scott_WUaS: we can possibly contact them over email. I am interested to know more about this :)

50:21 <arrbee> you got me curious

50:30 <Scott_WUaS> Yes ... sounds great

50:38 <arrbee> Alright

50:49 <arrbee> Moving on

51:06 <arrbee> There are quite a few language engineering projects which are open for this round of OPW

51:17 <arrbee> #link http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects#Internationalization_and_localization

51:25 <Scott_WUaS> (arrbee: it's the multi- and inter-lingual aspects of this potential that are fascinating :)

51:53 <arrbee> Please feel free to spread the word around to young women who may be interested in this field of work for OPW projects

52:01 <arrbee> Niharika: sucheta ^^

52:39 <arrbee> Scott_WUaS: very true. I hope we can get more information on this soon.

52:43 <Niharika> arrbee: I'm on it. :)

53:04 <arrbee> Niharika: Alright. :)

53:25 <Scott_WUaS> :)

54:39 <arrbee> aharoni|mobile: Nikerabbit, kart_ are listed mentors

54:59 <arrbee> possibly jsahleen will be joining in too

55:18 <arrbee> Please feel free to contact them

55:42 <arrbee> We have just under 5 minutes

57:06 <arrbee> Looks like there are no more questions :)

57:50 <arrbee> If nothing changes, our next office hour will be on November 12, 2014, but do lookout for the announcements for the exact date

58:10 <arrbee> Our mailing list is mediawiki-i18n@lists.wikimedia.org and IRC channel is #mediawiki-i18n

58:33 <arrbee> I will post the log from this meeting shortly on metawiki

59:27 <arrbee> Thanks everyone for joining in. See you next month.

59:29 <Scott_WUaS> Thank you, arrbee!

59:47 <arrbee> Do feel free to write directly to me if you have any questions about our projects

59:52 <arrbee> Thanks Scott_WUaS :)

00:11 <Niharika> Thanks arrbee. :)

00:14 <arrbee> Thanks Romaine. I will get back to you as soon as our infra setup issues are sorted.

00:16 <arrbee> Thanks Niharika

00:21 <Romaine> great

00:37 <arrbee> Thanks again!

00:38 <arrbee> #endmeeting
Generated by MeetBot 0.1.4 (http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot)