How to translate

Work in progress

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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 this 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 "Page_name/language_code". For example, "fr" is the language code for French and the link for the French translation of this page is  How to translate/fr ; for German, it 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.

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 In this case, the outdated messages will be notified by a small yellow clock icon, and available in the "outdated" tab in the translation menu.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

Good practices
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 translated_category_name Moreover, all category pages 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" on the side category banner of the current page.

Internal links
Internal links should be on the form display_text. 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. $name or $1 ) 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 are 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 of the special page of language stats.

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

About
If you have any questions on the meaning of a sentence, feel free to create 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.