ToolTranslate

This is the manual for the ToolTranslate tool. Feel free to translate it!

ToolTranslate in action

Purpose

Many tools on Toolforge lack interface translations, that is, they are only available in one language, usually English. Even tools that support multiple languages in the interface use clunky methods for adding new languages and translations. ToolTranslate offers a centralized, user-friendly way for The Community (TM) to provide translations for tools. Tools need to support this mechanism, that is, they need to be "worked over" once to use dynamic rather than static text in the interface. Original blog post.

Translate

1. Go to the tool
2. If requested, authorize the tool
3. Chose a tool to translate from the drop-down box at top or list on main page
4. Chose or add the language to translate into
5. Double-click the "cell" where your new translation should go, or the translation you wish to improve
6. Type in your text. You can use HTML (no JavaScript!). There may be a suggestion for translation from another tool with the same "key name", you can use it as a basis for your text.
7. Click OK. Done! Browser caching issues aside, your translation should show in the respective tool the next time you load it.

Resources

• Demo video on the ToolTranslate interface (used on the tool itself!)
• Simple demo tool and HTML/JS source
• WikiLovesMonuments (Wikidata edition) as a slightly more ambitious example
• git repo

Tech

Translations are stored in a database on Toolforge. Old revisions of translations are kept, and translations are attributed to the respective editor. (A "recent changes" tool is available.)

To simplify access to translation data, all translations are also stored in JSON files, which are updated on every change. Example "demotool1":

• toolinfo.json, a JSON file with information about the tool
• en.json, the JSON file containing the English translation of that tool. Other languages work in the same manner, with the respective language code

There is also a JSON file with all valid languages.

Database

The source data is stored in the s53069__tooltranslate_p database on tools-db on Toolforge (mysql --defaults-file=~/replica.my.cnf -h tools-db s53069__tooltranslate_p). Data can be fetched from there as well if needed. Following tables are available:

• tool
  • id | name | label | url | owner
• translation
  • id | tool_id | language | key | json | user | timestamp | current

HowTo: HTML/JS

• Check out the demo code
• The ToolTranslate JS code has a list of options you can use
• If you want a translated string (using example object tt), tt.t(key) or tt.t(key,{lang:language_code}) will get it for you
• In HTML, add the tt attribute to any tag, e.g. <span tt='key'></span>.
• Translation strings containing "https://bitbucket.org/magnusmanske/tooltranslate/src/d93e2e706a76be21ee02affb0bc1cdece8f087ae/public_html/demos/demotool1.html?at=master&fileviewer=file-view-default" to "$9" will have those automatically substituted by tag attributes "tt1" to "tt9", respectively. This is to allow the change of interface language without splitting texts into many fragments. The translation will not be touched if the attributes are missing. In JavaScript, tt.t(key,{params:['value for https://bitbucket.org/magnusmanske/tooltranslate/src/d93e2e706a76be21ee02affb0bc1cdece8f087ae/public_html/demos/demotool1.html?at=master&fileviewer=file-view-default','value for https://bitbucket.org/magnusmanske/tooltranslate/src/d93e2e706a76be21ee02affb0bc1cdece8f087ae/public_html/tt.js?at=master&fileviewer=file-view-default']}).

HowTo: PHP

There is a PHP class that you can include on Toolforge, like so:

require_once ( "/data/project/tooltranslate/public_html/tt.php") ;

You can then instantiate the class:

$tt = new ToolTranslation ( array ( 'tool' => 'your_tool_key' , 'language' => 'de' , 'fallback' => 'en' , 'highlight_missing' => true ) ) ; // Everything except 'tool' is optional

Direct usage

There are two ways of getting interface translations in PHP. One is directly getting a translated string

print "<p>" . $tt->t('translation_key') . "</p>" ;

But this has the disadvantage that the translation cannot be changed without reloading the page.

Use via JS

You can instead add HTML "translation tags" (see above), and have the class add the necessary JS invocation. Another advantage is that the PHP class does not need to load any translation files if you never use the "direct" translation above. To use HTML/JS translation, the <head> section of your pages' HTML needs to contain

<script src="https://tools-static.wmflabs.org/tooltranslate/tt.js">

(You will also need jQuery.) When generating the page, instead of the above, write:

print "<p tt='translation_key'></p>" ;

Somewhere in the output (maybe towards the end), you will need to add the invocation code:

print $tt->getJS() ;

This will initialize the required JS, reproducing the parameters used in the PHP instance (fallback language etc.). If you want a "translation dropdown", add a wrapper element in your HTML code

<div id='tooltranslate_wrapper'></div>

then give the jQuery accessor as a parameter to the getJS method call:

print $tt->getJS('#tooltranslate_wrapper') ;

See this tool for a working example.