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. This main language should be in English! Every change in the main page will set of a chain of events to translate this change to the derived translated pages.
Mark text that needs to be translated
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.
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. sirKitKat (talk) 21:28, 2 October 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.