Translate a Page

Available Tools

• Translation Workflow describes the workflow to migrate to the new translation system

Workflow

• Request addition to the Translator group:
  • Click on Get a Translator Account in the sidebar
  • Click on the Edit tab and enter your username, the language you want to translate for and if you intend to translate off-line
  • Use Save page to save the information
• When your user has been added to the group (you should get an e-mail notification), click on Start Translating in the sidebar
• Enter the language you want to translate to in Language code and click on Go

Note

Entering en (English) as the language code won't display any untranslated messages since all original content is written in English

• Click on a page you want to translate in the list
• In the Translate page set "View all untranslated messages" in the first drop-down list
• Check that the correct language code is showing
• In the Navigation section, click on the link to the left of the message you want to translate
• Enter the translation - a Google translation is provided for reference, but your own translation is usually preferred. Currently we don't have a Translation Memory tool, but that is planned development.
• Click on Save and open next to continue with the next message or Save page to save the translation if you wish to stop working.

Warning

Do not create a localized page variant manually (by entering pagename/langcode and trying to translate the original). This will mess up the translation system and no translation will be shown at all.

Hints and Tips

Image display instructions

A typical example is [[Image:Plasma-kickoff.jpg|right|160px]]. The whole of this is a system instruction on how to display the image. None of it is translated.

Category statements

In this context, think of the word "Category" as a system word which therefore should not be translated. For example, [[Category:Administration]] would become [[Category:Administrasi/id]]

For consistency, we have lists of approved translations of categories, and ask you to use them. You can find one suited to your language linked from Translation_Help_Needed. If there are any blanks in your table, feel free to add a suitable translation.

Links to other pages on UserBase

These take the form [[Special:myLanguage/Other page|link text]] The link should remain untranslated, whereas the link text should always be translated. If no link text is present, please add suitable (translated) link text.

Note: "myLanguage" will try to load the translated version of the link in the language you have set in your user preferences. If it fails to load it will just load the english original, so it is safe to use it for any internal link.

Links to external sites

These take the form [http://example.com link text] Like the internal links, retain the actual link and translate the link text.

Info-boxes

These generally consist of a header word "Information" and an editable information text. If the word "Information" is not recognizable in your language you may need a localized version of the template. Please ask if you need help with this.

Translated units are marked as fuzzy

Sometimes it may happen that you have translated a page, but the translation is marked as incomplete. Certain errors in the markup of the original page can cause this. The most common type of error is the appearance of unbalanced brackets or parentheses. The translation system requires that alle opening brackets ('[', '{' or '(' ) have a matching closing bracket (']', '}' or ')' ) in the same translation unit, otherwise the translation is considered incomplete.

The same rule is not enforced by the wiki software, so it is easy for writers to miss those mistakes. If a bracket characte is simply missing, just add it. However, sometimes the bracketed content extends over more than one translation unit, so that the matching closing bracket is in later unit. In this case you need to balance brackets in both units, but you can't simply add bracket characters without changing the meaning or formatting, so you must must comment out the added bracket character, like this

{{Info|1=Beginning of long info box... <!--}}-->

and in a later unit

<!--{{--> ...end of long info box}}

If the offending bracket is part of a smiley, you can replace it with an emoticon icon. For the standard smiley, :-), you can use the template {{Smiley}}

Please also correct the original page so other translators won't have the same problem, or leave a message on the discussion page.

Language Statistics discrepancies

You may notice some slight discrepancy between the percentages stated on your LanguageStats page and the percentage on the language bar. This is normal. LanguageStats compares only the number of messages that are untranslated or outdated. The language bar statistic tries to be more intelligent. For instance, in one page 8 messages had a small (re-branding-releated) change, in each case, a single word was involved. There was 8% difference between the two statistics, since it was a substantial proportion of the messages, but a small proportion of the whole translation.

If you use the Chromium browser....

Be aware that there seems to be some sort of cacheing problem on the Chromium browser. I have noticed that even with forced refreshes, sometimes statistics do not show up as they should (I have seen other things affected, too), yet if I open the same page in Firefox I see the correct stats.

Also See

• http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:Page_translation_feature#Translators