Hey Mark,

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 6:59 PM, Mark Holmquist <mtraceur@member.fsf.org> wrote:
Hello again, i18n list!

Thanks for sending the mail. Hello to you, too ;).
 

Today I'm here to bug you about a new extension, BetaFeatures[0].

Best thing since sliced bread!
 
It's
been high priority for me for the past few weeks, and it's coming to
fruition very quickly. Quim and I were just chatting about translating
it, though, and one of the strings (which is a description of a feature[1])
is very long, longer than one might expect for a translator to follow.

If you re-read this sentence, I think you may notice what's wrong, and what needs to be fixed. Ignore and read on for less of a puzzle :).
 

I'm wondering what the possible solutions are, for this. There will be
multiple features registered in the weeks to come, and it will be other
projects registering the features, not BetaFeatures itself. The messages
will likely be created in other repositories. So I'll need a recommendation
for those developers to avoid irritating translatewiki.

If there is a need to use a lot of text, a lot of text should be used. In case of the beta features, I think we should consider taking a hybrid approach. Make it as brief, international English and concise as possible descriptions of features. Give the features a title, as those are used to easily refer to the features (Flow, Notifications, ULS, Content translation, ...). Gadgets descriptions[2] are a good example, I think.

If you think you need the following amount of text to describe a feature:

This is for the daring, intrepid early adopters who want to see every single experimental feature as it rolls out. Your account will automatically get the latest features when they come out. You can always come back to this page to disable the ones you decide not to use, but this will give you the most bleeding-edge experience on the site.

... consider thinking some more. Does this say about the same, and conveys the same concept requiring less time of the user?

[checkbox] Automatically use all experimental features.

Some explanation:
- Sentence 1 and 2 appear to be slightly redundant and unnecessarily wordy.
- Sentence 3 is. IMO, a superfluous explanation of what a checkbox can do. It would be overkill to add this to each and every feature description. If you find it's really important for users to point out that a preference that was enabled on this location, can also be disabled here, consider adding it in the header of the special page, as the tip goes for all the feature descriptions.
 

Your help here is very much appreciated - we're looking to get this extension
out and deployed in the very near future, so it would be great to push
a new way to translate these longer messages very soon.

Short strings are skipped less often than longer strings. Users don't read. Two important reasons to keep things brief and clear.
 

[0] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BetaFeatures
[1] http://multimedia-alpha.wmflabs.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Betafeatures-auto-enroll-desc

[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences?uselang=en#mw-prefsection-gadgets
 



--
Siebrand Mazeland
Product Manager Language Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation