Hi everybody!

Been a while since I’ve posted here, but for all three of you readers (±3) I figured I should do an update.

Specifically, I’d like to report that I’ve been accepted for a second year to work on MusicBrainz for a second year in a row as part of the Google Summer of Code program. Last year I worked on the MusicBrainz Timeline Graph (and statistics in general); this year I’ll be working on internationalization of musicbrainz-server.

MusicBrainz: Now in Japanese!

Internationalization is an interesting topic in this context – the basic structure for i18n has been in musicbrainz-server from the start, but it’s never been particularly well set-up, and it’s never run on production. I’d like to fix both of these problems. As you can read on the GSoC Project Details page for my project, I’m doing this through three distinct “paths”: interface, domain-splitting, and general fixups. Domain-splitting deserves further explanation: currently, all our translatable strings are in one huge context – more than 5,000 strings. I’ll be splitting them up somewhat to group things contextually related, both so some things can be reused (for example: names of relationship types, which are useful for anything using MusicBrainz data) and so that translation isn’t quite so insurmountable a task.

My first task, during the “Community Bonding Period” through May 21, will be to find “language liaisons” – people who can serve as people I can ask questions of for languages I don’t personally know, to highlight problems with our system for those languages, file tickets, and serve as coordinators of translation teams.

Read more on the GSoC Project Details page for the project! For the interested, our current i18n/l10n is available on Transifex. I’ll be updating that soon, though, hopefully. Some of our translations, a bit out of date, are also running on i18n.mbsandbox.org, an internationalization-oriented MusicBrainz sandbox (note: I also run the MusicBrainz sandbox server).

I hope to report more soon!