Re: Appeal to devs: please be considerate on translator time

Hi,

I'll answer your side question. The "#special" syntax is used to represent
the translated name of the special page in the message while avoiding the
need for a translator to copy this to the message.

Thanks,

Dreamy Jazz


On Tue, 13 Jan 2026 at 14:14, Strainu <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> *Disclaimer*: I'm writing this mail with my translator hat on. Throughout
> this email I will give some examples encountered in today's translation
> session to clarify my arguments. If you wrote the code that contain those
> strings, please don't take this personally - it's a community problem, not
> a personal one.  This is why I'm not providing the exact message names, but
> only the strings.
>
> I've been translating OSS for 25+ years and MediaWiki for almost 20 years.
> For me, It has always been a common effort: the devs need to extract the
> strings, document them to give context and export them to the proper
> tooling, while translators need to understand the product, fill the
> (context) gaps and be consistent.
>
> With our 284 languages and hundreds of thousands of strings, we're
> definitely on the high side of effort needed for translations. However, in
> the last few years (I would say, roughly from Covid) I see more and more
> cases when the* effort is moved toward the translators*.
>
> It used to be that commons strings like Yes/No, Log in/Log out
> Watch/Unwatch, Edit or Save were only present once per module. Today? "Log
> in" (with this exact casing and no combinations) is present at least 5
> times in  MediaWiki core - User interface. Yes and No - 3 times each.
> Name - 4 times and the list on.
>
> Another type of duplication are messages 90%+ alike, such as "Talk pages
> for pages in the main/MediaWiki/.template namespace" instead of "Talk
> pages for pages in the $1 namespace". I found at least 3 such instances,
> there might be more.
>
> But wait, there is more. Strings like " [[{{#special:Contributions
> }}/$1|$2]] ([[{{ns:user_talk}}:$1|talk]]) " should not exist at all.
> First, there is absolutely no guidance on what parts should be translated.
> [1] I would guess only "talk", which should be replaced with reusing the
> simple message (aka {{int:talk}}), so nothing to translate. This would save
> the translators the significant amount of time needed to decode the
> message, make assumptions and (not) translate the text.  I have some more
> examples, but I'll stop here.
>
> We must not forget that the translators are also members of our community
> and the translation time wasted on such strings could be better used doing
> other activities in the Wikimedia world. The benefits are not small: 1s
> saved over 284 languages means almost 5 minutes. If fixing your string
> takes 15 min or less, it's probably worth it.
>
> I therefore encourage developers, project and people managers to* review
> their practices* on generating strings and reviewing code in order to *reduce
> the number of spurious messages* that the translators need to work on.
>
> Have a great year ahead and may you code be bug-free!
>   Strainu
>
> [1] As a side question, I'm very curious about the "#special " syntax -
> who's expanding that into a proper namespace?
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