User:Minorax/Guide for translating content on Meta-Wiki

(English) This is an essay. It expresses the opinions and ideas of some Wikimedians but may not have wide support. This is not policy on Meta, but it may be a policy or guideline on other Wikimedia projects. Feel free to update this page as needed, or use the discussion page to propose major changes.

Machine translations

However, there's a problem where users use translators such as Google translate. Using any type of translation software is strongly discouraged as they do not recognize wiki syntax and several issues may arise when machine translated content is added. One of which is that it can make translated pages unreadable. It is rather obvious when translators are used as the translated content will generally contain issues listed below.

Issues

When translating pages, there are several points to note so that red links do not appear in translated pages.

tvar tags: These should be left alone as they usually contain untranslatable content such as links to talk pages and/or links to translatable pages in the user's language. When translating pages using Special:Translate, the variable will appear with a $, such as $translate. The translation extension only recognize variables that match those in the main page. i.e. $ translate will not work.
Wiki syntax: These should also match those in the main page, ''' is used to bold the text and '' is used to italicize them. '' ' is not the same as '''.
Interwiki links such as :w:en:: These can be "translated" to link to equivalent pages on wikis. i.e. w:en:Wikipedia can be changed to w:zh:维基百科.

Translation documentation (/qqq)

These pages are used to inform translators about what a specific sentence means. /qqq pages should not be used to ask questions as it is not a documentation per se.

Updating

When updating translation source text, please note that if the new content is totally unrelated to the old version, do not reuse the translation unit markup.