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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2016-04-12 23:31 GMT+03:00 Jon Robson <[email protected]>:

> On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 4:29 PM, Niklas Laxström
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > 2016-04-05 8:51 GMT+03:00 Jon Robson <[email protected]>:
> >> Special:Translate doesn't work [1] and the current plan is to make it
> >> redirect to desktop which is disappointing and I'd guess loses us lots
> of
> >> potential editors (myself included).
> >
> > When we developed the new interface for Special:Translate (aka TUX) we
> > did some testing that it works on tablets. Is there way to mark it
> > suitable for tablets alone because we have not designed it for smart
> > phones?
>
> It depends on what libraries it uses and whether those are mobile
> friendly. Best thing to do is create a Phabricator task and tag
> "reading web" and we can start exploring that. Definitely happy to
> help (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T102922#1466929).
>
> Personally, I'd love the reading web team to collaborate with the
> languages team more - maybe that's something we can try to convince
> the powers that be to set aside time for as a future quarterly goal.
>
> >
> > And what can we do for the rest? Let them too access TUX acknowledging
> > it will be heavy and clunky? Would it make sense to generate minimal
> > non-JavaScript version for all the rest using which they can get the
> > job done if they are desperate but without all the advanced features
> > of the regular TUX UI?
> >
> > Or in short, I am wondering whether "mobile support" is all or
> > nothing, or whether there is some middle way where we can have some
> > quick wins if the alternative is to have no support at all?
>
> All good questions and I'm not sure of the answer. Amir did a super
> interesting hack using Whatsapp and translate wiki at the hackathon in
> Jerusalem. If porting the existing translate interface to mobile
> proves too cumbersome we might want to explore and test some small
> lightweight translating tools.
>

Telegram, actually, but yeah, thanks a lot for the shout-out :) The code is
at https://github.com/amire80/mediawiki-telegram-bot/ ; it was good enough
for hackathon demo, but too buggy and insecure to run as a production
service, although I plan to make it live Some Time Soon.

The main thing that made building this hack easy is the fine-grained
division of the text to small translatable chunks—precisely the thing that
the otherwise rightly dreaded <translate> tag provides. Making this
chunking more automatic would be one possible strategy, but major
development effort will be required for this.

Translation on mobile devices is desperately needed for a whole lot of
reasons, and I hope we will be in a completely different situation with
regards to this in a couple of years. Four years ago one could barely edit
Wikipedia on mobile, and look where we are now, so I'm optimistic.
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