The Wikimedia Foundation and Red Hat co-organized an Open Source Language Summit in Pune, India on November 6-7, 2012. The summit focused on language tools and technology development to support languages on Wikipedia, the Web, Linux and other Open Source platforms.
In total, 45 core language technology developers, open source contributors, typographers and technology evangelists from the Wikimedia Language Engineering and Mobile teams, Red Hat, Mozilla Foundation, KDE, GNOME, translatewiki.net and other open source projects participated in sessions and work sprints on internationalization and localization features supporting various open source projects on the web and Linux. After brief introductory talks, we focused our work on font support, input method tools, language search, and web and localisation standards.
Highlights:
The event had short talks on the following topics:
- Updates on current language engineering activities from Wikimedia Foundation, Redhat, Mozilla, GNOME, KDE
- Overview of translation content management platforms like translatewiki.net (slides), zanata, transifex and discussions (notes)
- Developing standards for localization backend infrastructure and tools to facilitate improved interoperability between localisation platforms
- Input method tools (IMEs) to input non-Latin scripts like jquery.ime for web, gnome-transliteration for desktop and ibus-typing-booster for faster typing on desktop
- Making language selection easy across 300+ languages using Universal Language Selector
- State of Pango, Harfbuzz (rendering engines) and font development for Indic languages
- Discussion on standards like CLDR, Unicode, GLIBC, InScript and how to improve representation and participation from various open source projects
- Overview of language support on mobile today and language support in Wikimedia Foundation mobile apps (slides)
- Challenges for language support in browsers and beyond (slides)
- Building consistent user experience in languages using FUEL, which aims to standardize terminology used for software localization. (FUEL mobile notes)
- Font testing using Unicode Text Rendering Reference System
- Rethinking font development workflow (slides)
- Tutorial on font development, typography and discussion on roadmap for Lohit fonts
- Tutorial on i18n testing practices and Fedora Language Testing Group
The following people won prizes for their code contributions during the event:
- Anish Patil ported Universal Language Selector’s cross-language search algorithm to gnome language search
- Aravinda VK wrote a set of font-forge python wrappers to make changes to fonts programmatically. Aravinda fixed a few bugs in Kannada Gubbi font for Harfbuzz rendering engine and also wrote Kannada KGP keymap for jquery.ime
- G Karunakar added Hindi inscript keyboard layout to Firefox OS GAIA
Other accomplishments included:
- Kushal Das added patches to deploy Universal Language Selector on http://www.mozilla.org and also a patch for a bug on Mozilla localization platform.
- Alolita, Sankarshan, Runa, Satish worked on discussing APIs for various translation workflows and putting together an initial specification.
- Rajeesh Nambiar, Hussain KH, Ani Peter, Praveen A and Pravin Satpute fixed and filed upstream bugs for Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati and Punjabi fonts with Harfbuzz.
- Parag Nemade added InScript2 keyboards for Sanskrit, Nepali, Marathi and Konkani to jquery.ime.
- Ankit Gadgil wrote over 200 unit tests for Marathi and Hindi input methods in jquery.ime.
- Yuvaraj Pandian, Pau Giner, Arun Ganesh and Siebrand Mazeland developed an initial version of an Android-native app for Translatewiki.net for translation reviews.
- Pau Giner conducted user testing with new translation prototypes with translators. Arun Ganesh created an icon for gnome-transliteration.
You can browse through tweets and more notes from the event. Happy reading!
Srikanth Lakshmanan
Internationalisation/Localisation Outreach / QA Engineer
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