User:Quiddity (WMF)/Translation notes
Rough notes, that I want to triple-check, expand, and perhaps integrate into existing docs…
TL;DR / Reminders edit
- Use the wikitext editor, not the Visual Editor, to markup the initial page.
- Include empty-lines between each header and paragraph block. That's how the software keeps the blocks separated.
- Don't ever manually add the little
<!--T:4-->
"translation unit markers". The software needs to add those. They are implicitly connected to the chunks of text that are sent into the translation interface. - If you move a block of text, move the "unit marker" along with it.
- They appear before paragraphs, or after headings.
- If you delete them, but retain the text, then volunteers would need to either re-translate that text (into every language), or spend time re-associating the correct unit markers that had been used.
- Try to minimize big-changes, once a page has been marked for translation. I.e. Avoid frequent changes to the wording of a single paragraph many times over the course of a few weeks. If a volunteer is trying to keep a page up-to-date, they'll have to rewrite it every time!
- Avoid clustering many distinct pieces, or wiki-markup, by splitting with separate blocks (via linebreaks) or distinct
<translate>
wrappers for:- Headers,
- paragraphs,
- bullet-list-points (excluding the "*" or "#"), and
- table-cells.
- Good example pages:
(Notes needed. Some good details within Tech/News/Manual#Writing guidelines)
- <tvars>
- … (TBC)
- Links
- … (TBC)
- <bdi>
- … (TBC)
Process details, the simple version edit
You can also check the documentation on MediaWiki. Steps below are for Meta but work on Commons or MediaWiki.
- A translation administrator or editor adds
<translate></translate>
tags to a page and a<languages />
tag at the top.- In some cases, we need separate
<translate></translate>
tags for some of the Headers, paragraphs, bullet-list-points (excluding the "*" or "#"), and table-cells. (I.e. We try to avoid making the translators have to include a ton of wikimarkup, e.g. for a Table. See this example diff.) - We also need to add
…
wrappers for most links (except where they ought to be localizable, such as a link to a Wikipedia article), and occasionally some keywords.
- In some cases, we need separate
- Pages with
<translate></translate>
tags will appear in m:Special:PageTranslation. - A translation administrator "marks" the page for translation by click a "mark for translation" link that is only visible (at the top of the page) to them. If you have forgotten a
</translate>
tag or something, you will receive a warning. - Fuzzybot is triggered, which automatically finds the text that needs to be translated and adds
<!--T:#-->
tags throughout the page, which indicate what sections need to be translated. - The page will now be available for translating - Any translations will appear in the at the top.
- If a page is marked for translation, any user can translate the page.
Not ready yet? – If a page is not yet ready/stable for translation, you can tag it with a (Meta-wiki) {{Draft}}
or (MediaWiki) {{DoNotTranslate}}
template at the top of the page.
How it technically works edit
Here is a good example-set showing how it technically works.
Open the following links to compare how the same content is edited/stored/shown in different ways. We're just looking at this single line near the top of #1:
Which is rendered in English as:
Wikifunctions's first goal is to support the Wikimedia projects, but it will support goals beyond that, just as with Wikidata. This is a description of Wikifunctions beyond Wikipedia.
or in Japanese as:
Wikifunctionsの最初の目標は ウィキメディアのプロジェクト群のサポートですが、 ウィキデータと同様にその先の目標もサポートします。これは ウィキペディアの先にあるWikifunctionsの説明です。
- Editors edit the base-language page (usually English, but can be any language):
- After a translation-admin adds the necessary code, and marks it as "ready for translation", it becomes available to translators like this:
- Each of those text chunks is simply saved separately, and then combined for the rendered page. E.g.
- (created in step 2) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translations:Abstract_Wikipedia/Overview/1/ja
- (is embedded into) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Overview/ja
- You can see all the languages which have already translated that string: