Welcome, glorious translator. We have a lot of work to do: let's get over the basics very quickly so that you can start as soon as possible.
We hope that wherever you come from, the translation administrators have already setup something to translate. The things covered here do not depend on that particular page, and apply to everything you can translate with this tool.
Maybe you already have a link from someone, asking you to translate something. If not you can check the translator dashboard, in your wiki for something to translate. If you just want to see how it works in general, you can still read along and watch the screenshots to get an impression of it.
In Wazeopedia You need one of the local champs to assign a page for translation. You will quickly notice if you lack the rights to translate. If this is the case, contact a translation administrator of your wiki. Let's start with getting to the translation view.
Mark page for translation
- 1. Go to the page for translation in your wiki.
- 2. Enter edit mode
- 3. Wrap the whole content inside <translate>...</translate> tags as shown below
- 4. Save the page
<translate> Fréttinga is a small municipality in MungoLand, located on the BaMungo island. It hosts a population of about 400 people. It has some agriculture and fishing. Tourists like to visit it in the summer time. == Services == It doesn't have many services. There is a shop and car ferry visits the island from mainland once a day. </translate>
Enabling translations
After saving the page, you will see a link at the top of the page saying "Mark this page for translation" - or "This page contains changes which are not marked for translation." if you are not a translation administrator. If you are a translation administrator, then click on the "Mark this page for translation" link. The page has been automatically split into four translation units. The first unit is the title of the page, the second is the first paragraph, the third is the header of the second paragraph, and the fourth is the text of the second paragraph. These are the basics items of translatable pages: each unit is independent; it can and must be translated as a whole; changes to the page content are tracked into the unit level. Units can be rearranged or deleted.
There is also a view of the page translation page template; this will be covered in later steps. You can give names to the translation units, but in this example, we choose to stick with the defaults.
- 5. Click the "Mark this page for translation" link
- 6. Click the "Mark this version for translation" button
- 7. Return to the page
Now you will see a new link at the top, "Translate this page", that lets translators to translate the page.
Making changes
Tracking changes is a very important feature, so let's make some changes and see how it works. When you open the page for editing you will see that it has been modified with markers like <!--T:1-->. These are added by the extension and help it identify which unit is which. This allows you to rearrange and edit those units. When editing the page, the markers should be left alone and their position in relation to the unit they belong to should not be changed. When moving a unit, move the unit marker, too. When deleting a unit, delete the marker too. When adding new paragraphs, new markers will be added by the software. Do not try to do this manually, it may confuse the software.
<languages /> <translate> <!--T:1--> Fréttinga is a small municipality in MungoLand, located on the BaMungo island. It hosts a population of about 400 people. It has some agriculture and fishing. Tourists like to visit it in the summer time. It has marvelous beaches with a lot of seagulls. == Services == <!--T:2--> <!--T:3--> It doesn't have many services. There is a shop and car ferry visits the island from mainland once a day. In 2009 January the roof of the church in the island fell down. It was rebuilt collaboratively in the following summer. </translate>
- 8. Make some additions as highlighted above
- 9. Click the "marked for translation" link at the top
- 10. Observe the changes
- 11. Click the "Mark for translation" button
- 12. Return to the original page
If you made translations as suggested in the previous step, you can now see those translations linked at the top of the page. You will also see that the translation is not 100 % up to date. If you look at the translated version, you will see the new paragraph in English, and the changed paragraphs are replaced with the English text. If you go to the translation view, you see that the unit is marked as in need of updating.
The translation template view helps you to see what parts of the page are constant in all language versions (the "translation page template", i.e. the parts outside translate tags) and also shows you if units have been moved around or deleted.
There might be a slight delay before all translated versions are updated, because there can be many pages to update.
You now know the basics, but this tutorial will continue with more things that you are likely to encounter.
Adding other wiki elements
You have a basic translatable page now, but it is very dull. Let's add an image and some other stuff to make it look more like a normal wiki page and see how those elements interact with translation.
We also removed a paragraph, including its unit marker, and replaced it with a list, so you can see what happens.
- 13. Add an image, a category and a list to the page as shown below
- 14. Save the page
- 15. Click the link "marked for translation" at the top of the page
- 16. Verify that the changes look as intended
- 17. Click the "Mark this version for translation" button
- 18. Return to the translatable page
<languages /> [[File:Torsö.jpg|thumb|<translate>A typical view of Fréttinga</translate>]] <translate> <!--T:1--> Fréttinga is a small municipality in MungoLand, located on the BaMungo island. It hosts a population of about 400 people. It has some agriculture and fishing and tourists like to visit it in the summer time. It has marvelous beaches with a lot of [[Special:MyLanguage/Seagull|seagulls]]. == Services == <!--T:2--> <!--T:3--> It doesn't have many services. There is a shop and a car ferry visits the island from the mainland once a day. Main events: * The roof of the church fell down in 2009 * New church was built in 1877 [[Category:Municipalities]] </translate>
Here you can see that we left most of the image markup outside of a translation unit and have it in the translation page template instead. This is usually okay, but sometimes translators may want to change the image, especially if it contains linguistic content (text). In those cases it's usually easiest to include the whole markup in a unit (as we did for the category). When the translation of a unit involves or interacts with markup it's a good idea to write a small tip to the translators about it. You can do this with the following steps.
- 19. Click "Translate this page" link at the top
- 20. Select "qqq - Page documentation" language
- 21. Click the message name which contains the message "A typical view of Fréttinga"
- 22. Write "Description of an image" and click "Save"
In this example, the whole category assignment is a translation unit. This lets translators change it to [[Category:Municipalities/de]] or whatever naming convention you want to use for categories. If it were outside the translation template, you would have all the pages Foo, Foo/de, Foo/ru, Foo/ta and so on in the same category. Sometimes this is okay, but usually it distracts the users. Make sure your translators know what the local convention is.
Similarly, for links there are many ways to do it. We used "[[Special:MyLanguage/Seagull]]", which automatically redirects to the translated version of the page depending on the users' interface language (if that translation exists). This isn't an ultimate solution, because users will always be redirected to the interface language they're using, not to the language they are currently reading. Special:MyLanguage also interferes with Special:WhatLinksHere and makes it not work. The good thing about Special:MyLanguage is that you always get some version of the page, even if the requested translation doesn't exist.
- 1a. Go to the page you want to translate.
- 2a. Click the "Translate this page" link (if it does not show up you don't have permission to translate).
Or you can try:
- 1b. Go to the translator dashboard.
- 2b. Click the name of any message group that has untranslated messages.
Messages to translate are grouped by "message group": Each translatable page is a message group, but there can be other kinds of message groups too.
- 3. Choose a language other than the language of the source text (which usually is English or
en).
Translation editor
This view and variations of it are the basic interface you will be working in. The long list of messages still to be translated may occasionally depress you, but fortunately we don't actually need to watch that list so often. You should see at least some untranslated messages here. Let's make your first translation. Click a row to open the translation editor. You will see the source text you need to translate and a text area where you can write your translation. If you clicked the first message listed for the page Fréttinga, it should say "Fréttinga" as the content. Since it is a name, you don't usually need to change it, so you can copy it as-is to the text area. If your language uses a different writing system, you can choose to transliterate it. Then just click save and you are done!
- 4. Click the message name on the left column.
- 5. In the editor dialog, write the translation of the source text in the place reserved for it.
- 6. Click or tap "Save translation".
Depending on the configuration of the wiki, you may also see other things in the editor besides the source text. There may be suggestions from translation memories or machine translation systems. There can be a section for tips that provide crucial information that you need to use to make a correct translation. So if there are tips, read them carefully. If there are no tips and you feel like you need them, ask someone in the wiki to add them; if you are knowledgeable enough about the text that needs translation, add them yourself. These tips help you to translate better and faster. Don't feel ashamed to ask for clarifications – it's highly likely that the other tens or hundreds translators are wasting their time thinking of the same issues.
One more thing about the translation aids: if you benefit from seeing the message translated into other languages as additional tip, go to your preferences –> Editing –> Translation options and add one or more assistant languages for yourself.
Feel free to make a few more translations and try out the other buttons. Clicking the suggestions or the "Paste source" button will immediately paste that text in the text area, overwriting anything already in that text area.
Translation view
Here we are again, watching the list with untranslated messages. If you refresh the page, the list should now be shorter, or even empty. The view has information like description of the group, but more interesting at the top you can choose language, message group and different message filters.
All message groups function the same way, and you don't need to worry about them too much. The important thing is that you always need to choose a message group to work on, and things like statistics and completion percentages are calculated on message group level.
From the different views at the bar at the bottom, you can switch to the view suitable for doing other tasks, like review or translating whole pages. Depending the configuration, you should see all or some of the following vies: "List", "Page" and "Proofreading". Read more about reviewing translations and other quality assurance methods in the quality assurance page.
The page can also contain the message group status near the message group description, which can be set for each language of the group; if you see a dropdown selector of the possible states, it means that you can change it, and you should update it when you are working on the translation or if you are reviewing it. See more about workflow states in the message group states page.
Important concepts
You already know what a message group is, and have seen the translation editor and assistant languages. Now the translation administrator may have continued their page translation tutorial and changed the contents of the page Fréttinga. When the text that must be translated changes, it will show up again in the list of untranslated messages and also in the list of outdated messages.
When facing outdated messages, you have two options. You can confirm that the translation does not need any changes after all, or you can make the necessary changes to it. Messages may appear to be outdated automatically when a new translation is saved, if the automatic checks find issues in the translation, like for example unbalanced link syntax missing the other "]" character. You will also get a warning about these when editing the translation.
The outdated translations are replaced with the source text in translatable pages. If you now return to the translated page by clicking the link on the message group description, you should see that your translations are already there. Most of the translations you will make are applied immediately with exception about some message groups, like many of those in translatewiki.net, where the translation are regularly and manually exported by translation administrators to the software they are used in.
One more useful tip when translating translatable pages: magic words like {{FORMATNUM}} will format the output in the translation language, not in the language of the source text. If you like, you can read more on how magic words work and should be used in translations. This is not required reading, though.
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This page is imported from Wikipedia guide for translating content. |