Mediawiki translation support tools
From Akvo Labs
The Akvopedia is currently only available in English. This is the part of the Akvo platform which we get the most requests for content translations for.
Why Akvopedia is (currently) in English only
The Akvopedia is based on the Mediawiki engine, which is the same software that powers Wikipedia. MediaWiki does not do multiple languages in the same site, but has a hybrid solution called wiki-family. This allows for:
"virtual directories" to operate more than one wiki on a single server, using the same source code (i.e. single set of MediaWiki files), using the same database, on a Unix-based system on a shared host.
For the end user there is not such a big difference, but software engineering-wise there is. The work of providing translations for the Mediawiki user interface is provided by the software developers that produce Mediawiki and can be installed by us for free. But there is some effort required to configure Mediawiki to run smoothly with multiple language versions.
Translations of the articles inside the Akvopedia is a bigger issue. Wikipedia has taken a very relaxed approach to translations of articles. This means that essentially not two articles about the same subject in different languages on the Wikipedia are the same. For the Akvopedia we think this would be a bad development and we are interested in ideally having a close match between Akvopedia articles in different languages. This would have to be done with the help of volunteer translators or some type of external funding for the translation effort.
However, as the translation will be ongoing and the growth of the job is directly related to the number of articles you have on the site and the number of languages we will decide to try to support it could become a big job. Possibly too big to manage. For now we are working on the Akvopedia in English, but are very interested in finding partner organisations who want to help us with other languages.
We believe that with our current resources, manually managing translations in a wiki between multiple languages (10+) is not really a viable way forward, even if we only have very few articles like the Akvopedia. The task quickly becomes a large one and the reliability of the content suffers. And reliable content is one of the key selling points of the Akvopedia at this point.
(This whole section lifted from the Internationalisation page in the Akvo platform description.)
Way forward
We believe quite a few Mediawiki based wikis would benefit from good language translation management tools. Now the question is really about who is interested in the end result enough to help us support the required software development. A very rough estimate of the magnitude of the effort is 3-4 software developers for 6 months. (Estimate by Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson and Vinay Gupta.)
We have also been discussing this with the folks at Appropedia, and they have a page describing their thoughts on the subject.
