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A natural language interface is only “natural” if it’s in your natural language. With this mantra in mind, we’ve been making steady progress on the challenging problem of Ubiquity localization. The first fruit of this research is in the localization of the parser and bundled commands in Ubiquity 0.5. Here today is a visual guide on command localization in Ubiquity and different options we can take in attacking the community command localization problem. (more…)

As many of you know, earlier this week we released a preview of version 0.5 (0.5pre). We’re going to stress test and refine this release through the weekend and push the official 0.5 out next Tuesday. This release will have fully localized commands for Danish and Japanese, as well as parser settings for a number of other languages. Read this Labs blog post to learn more about the 0.5 release and how to test it.

It’s not too late to add localizations for other languages to 0.5, though. Localizations help make Ubiquity more “natural” for more users, offering a new level of ease and familiarity to the already powerful Ubiquity. We have a new tutorial to help you localize commands.

To help encourage command localization, we now have gettext-style po template files for all the bundled command feeds in the hg repository. You can find these files in the ubiquity/localization/templates directory of the repository, or on our online hg repository.

If you complete some localizations (even incomplete) for your language and would like to submit them into the repository, for the time being, you can post them on this trac ticket.¹

I’ll be looking forward to seeing your localizations! If you have any questions, feel free to ask on the ubiquity-i18n Google group or on irc.mozilla.org#ubiquity. ^^

As we move closer and closer to shipping a Ubiquity with there is still much work to be done, particularly in the area of localization. In a recent Ubiquity meeting we laid out the explicit localization goals and non-goals of as follows:

• Goals for 0.5
  • Parser 2 (on by default)
  • underlying support for localization of commands
  • localization of standard feed commands for a few languages
  • Parser 2 language files for those same languages
• Nongoals for 0.5
  • distribution/sharing of localizations
  • localization of nountypes

The overall goal for this release of Ubiquity is to come up with a format and standard for localization. Localizations in Ubiquity 0.5 will only apply to commands bundled with Ubiquity, and the localization files themselves will be distributed with Ubiquity. In a future release we will tackle the problem of localizations for commands in the wild and truly croud-source¹ this process.

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Ubiquity’s proposed new parser design is based on a principles and parameters philosophy: we can build an underlying universal parser and, for each individual language, we simply set some “parameters” to tell the parser how to act. As we consider the design’s pros and cons, it’s important to reflect back on the linguistic data and see if this architecture can adequately handle the range of linguistic data attested in our languages.

Today I’ll examine highlight some disparate typological data to help us understand these questions: where’s the verb? and what does the verb look like? (more…)

I recently have traveled a fair deal and have met many people excited about the Ubiquity project and its localization efforts. “I want to help,” say the people, but many are unsure where to start.

As a linguist, studying a language involves looking at instances of that language as data. To this end, we as Ubiquity internationalizers need to get at some examples of target utterances. Here’s an example survey which could be a good starting point for native speakers who want to contribute information on their language, based on Blair’s list of common Ubiquity verbs.

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