How to translate

Thank you for joining the translators!

This page will explain the translation process in the wiki. If you want to contribute to the wiki translation, you are in the good place! Here are informations about translation and on current good practices in.

Translation basics
On a page is completed, it is marked for translation. To translate a page, just click on the "Translate this page" button at the top of the page, select a language, and voilà! You can begin the translation.

Translatable pages are divided in translation units, called "messages". Each unit is independent of the others. This makes it possible to translate the text step by step, and also makes it easier to monitor the translation.

Once a language for translation is validated, a new page is created, with a new link named Page_name/language_code. For example,  How to translate is the original page; "fr" is the language code for French and the link for the French translation of this page is  How to translate/fr ; for German, language code is "de" and  How to translate/de, etc.

On the original (English) page, the new available language for this page appears in the language banner.

You can return to the translation at any time. The percentage of unit translation is displayed at top of translated page, and by colored squares on the language banner. Note that translations need few minutes to be taken into account, don't panic if you don't immediately see your tranlation, just come back later.

If the original page have been modified since your first translation, the modified text will be highlighted in red. In this case, the outdated messages will be notified by a small yellow clock icon, and available in the "Outdated" tab in the translation menu.

If a complete page is not yet available to translation, this is probably because the translation administrators has not yet validated the complete page (see admin section below). If a page has just been marked for translation,

Good practices
Here are detailed the good practices about translation in this wiki. If you have doubt, don't hesitate to contact a translation administrator on the TMQ Discord.

Categories
Category names are not translatable. However, when a category is called, its displayed name can be translated with. Moreover, all category pages - including their titles - are translatable.

In original page, categories have the form  and are normally not included in translation units. This form allows to create a category page by language, on the form Category_name/language_code, added to the category side banner of the current page depending on its language.

Internal links
Internal links should be on the form. Only the display_text have to be translated. This form allows redirection to the translated page - if exists - in the language of the user interface.

Fixed terms
Sometimes, a word or a number may be preceded by a dollar (e.g.  or  ) with no apparent connection to the text. These dollar-term allows to block the corresponding text in original page and avoid translation (for example, the dollar-term may contain a link or a number that does not differ between languages). These variables are shown by the tag  in source page code.

Others
Element between arrows  and   are named tags and are part of the wikicode. They have to be written as is in the translation to keep the same format as the source page.

Translation tracking
All editable pages are translatable, even template or category pages.

All pages that are marked for translation can be viewed here.

Translation state of messages can be viewed in the special page of language stats by selecting the corresponding language code.

This special page shows the current active languages in the wiki, and the main contributors for each one.

Translation administrators
Translation administrators verify and mark complete pages for translation. They add translation tags in source page code around the elements to be translated (with tags ). Translation tags can be used in several places, to allow translation of only relevant elements (for example, translate text in table cells or image legend rather than reproduce all the wikicode for translators).

They also add the language banner (tag ), and verify that the wikicode is correct to allow an optimal translation. For example, correctly separation of titles from paragraph, good writing of categories and internal links, etc.

After being marked for translation, a page is immediately available for translation, but need few minutes to take account modifications in the translated pages (passage of the translation bot FuzzyBot ), especially if a page have been already translated and then marked again for tranlation.

Translation units or messages
Each tanslation unit, called message, is indicated by tag  (where x is a number). This tag is placed automatically by a bot, don't add one by yourself. However, this tag can be moved or deleted. Be careful, if a translation tag Tx is removed, its corresponding message will also be removed, even if there are existing corresponding translations!

Categories
Categories are written as. This form automatically creates a category page by active language, in which the translated page are tagged. This also allows to translate the category page directlty from the original page (in English). So original pages tagged in a category - e.g. Category:Horse Life Series - will have their translated pages tagged only in the corresponding translated version of the category - e.g. Category:Horse Life Series/fr for a French translation. For example, the original page How to translate is tagged in User Guide category, while its French version is tagged in Category:User Guide/fr which is the translated category page.

Internal links
Wiki internal links have to be written as. Special:MyLanguage automatically redirects to the page page_name in the user inteface language if the translated version exists. For example, this link redirects to this page into your user interface language, rather than the original page or the page translated into French.

Page internal links have the form  where the title_key key indicates where the link should lead by using tags. For example this link redirects to the translation administrators section of this page.

Fixed terms
It is possible to avoid the translation of a specific element. For this, simply use tags  where content will be displayed in all pages (original and translated ones) while only $key will be displayed for translators. This can be used to block numbers, external links or category names for example.

Help
If you want to learn more about translation management, please read MediaWiki Helps:
 * Translation tutorial
 * Tutorial for translation administrators
 * Translation best practices
 * Complete guide for translation administrators
 * or just ask for help on TMQ Discord.

Any questions?
If you have any questions on the meaning of a sentence, feel free to create a talk for the translated page. More generally, if you have any questions about translation process or sentence meaning, you can contact members on TMQ Discord. You can use this page test as a sandbox to test wiki functions.