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Translation on the wiki is not yet working properly. |
What is there to learn about translating this wiki.
When to apply translation
Translation can be used in country's or area's where multiple languages are used. Belgium is a good example: about 50-50 French-Dutch and also a small part German.
How to use
Steps you have to take to translate a particular page.
Prepare your main page
Translated pages are derived pages from a main page in an other language. The main language for the waze wiki is English and the base page must be written in this language! Every change in the main page will set of a chain of events to translate this change to the derived translated pages.
Add a language bar
On top of the page, you can add a language bar where users can switch between the available languages for the page. A languages bar is added on the place where you insert the <languages /> tag on the page.
Propose text in the page for translation
Once your main page is in English, you can mark the text that needs to be translated with <translate> and </translate> tags. You can use more then one tag on a page.
Text, images and other objects that does not need translation you can place outside the <translate> and </translate> tags.
The Translation tags could also be used in descriptions of images:
[[File:Benelux Header.png | 700px | Link = Benelux | <translate>This is the Benelux header</translate> ]]
Translation units
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. [1]
Translation administrator
After the creation of the <translate> and </translate> tags or if the text is changed, an translation administrator has to approve the text to be translated. This is to avoid waste of time for the translators.
More to come
As this is a new plugin for me, I am figuring out how exactly it is suppose to work. At the moment, I am this far with exploring this feature and resolving bugs with the waze developers. sirKitKat (talk) 22:39, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
Under the hood
Translating pages on the wiki is done with the help of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle.
Extension in this bundle provide the necessary tools for translating a wiki. The following extensions are part of the bundle (Version MLEB 2013.09):
- Translate
- Special page for translating MediaWiki and beyond
- Babel
- Adds the #babel parser function to allow automated generation of a babel userbox column with the ability to include custom templates
- Clean Changes
- More compact display of the recent changes list
- Language Names
- Extension which provides localised language names based on CLDR data
- LocalisationUpdate
- Keeps the localised messages as up to date as possible
- UniversalLanguageSelector
- Gives the user several ways to select a language and to adjust language settings
More info over installed extensions can be found in the Special Version page.