Translating/HowTo

There are many issues that make translating a not-so-simple act. The very nature of a wiki (highly mutable sources) complicates them. What follows is the sequence of steps allowing for a homogeneous structure in the wiki. Hopefuly this will allow anybody to collaborate in the Translating effort without too much overhead.

Step-by-step

From the point-of-view of the wiki, there are basically three tasks to hook up a translated page:

1. modify the source page — if it has never been translated;
2. adding a reference — point/link to the translation in a standard way; and
3. conditioning the translated page — adding some helper structure.

Most of the time, translators will only deal with the last two steps (setting up and linking the translation).

You can see an overview of the relevant structure of a page, and a full finished example towards the end of this page.

Setting up the source page

We'll assume that you want to translate a page that is maintained by the OLPC team; meaning that it will have a reference to the {{OLPC}} template—that groups pages in the Category:Pages maintained by OLPC—and they frequently are the entry points or that contain information that may be more obviously helpful for the local communities.

If the page to translate already has a language bar, you can skip down to #Modifying the language bar.

[[Original page]]	(translated page does not exist—yet)
{{OLPC}} == Some header == Some text blah... blah... [[#Another header]] ... blah == Another header == Some other text blah... blah... [[Another page]] and [[Another page#section|section]] ... blah

Adding the language bar

Although ever more rare, you may find yourself wanting to translate a page that nobody else has translated. In that case, you need to add a translations navigation bar in the original page.

[[Original page]]	(translated page does not exist—yet)
{{OLPC}} {{Translations}} == Some header == Some text blah... blah... [[#Another header]] ... blah == Another header == Some other text blah... blah... [[Another page]] and [[Another page#section|section]] ... blah

Setting up the /translations

You should follow the [[Original page/translations]] link in order to edit the page that groups the translations of a particular page, and should look something like this:

The resulting page will have a red link, denoting a missing/broken link to your future translation. Don't worry, you'll fix that in the next step.

NOTE: Although you could give any name to the translated page (ie: instead of "The OLPC Wiki/lang-es" you could do "El Wiki de la OLPC"). As a matter of fact, there are quite some pages that follow that structure, but most of them are either left overs from when there wasn't a clear structure and way for adding translations. As mentioned in the translating pages, there are advantages to sticking with the /lang-xx structure, particularly because you can always create a #REDIRECT in the native language to your translated version.

Modifying the language bar

The language bar (depicted below) has in the far right a +/- link that enables you to edit the links to the translated pages. Following it you can add your target page.

Please insert the link to your page trying to keep the alphabetical order denoted by the /lang-xx sequence (if you're adding say /lang-de it should go before the link to 'english'). Also, note the spaces around the '|' that separate each language. See above on /translations for more info.

Setting up the translated page

There are several ways that you can decide to actually translate a page. But there are some things that you want to keep in mind. First of all, you must declare it as a {{Translation}} (please note the use of the singular (plural is for the original page, that has many translations). Second, you want to keep navigation and linking within the translated pages easy. And finally, you may want to preserve the original text in the translation in order to simplify the review and maintenance.

The easiest way to set it up, is to go back to the original page, copy the wiki-text (in other words, either follow the edit (or view source if protected) and copy it fully and paste it to the new page.

Adding the Translation template

[[Original page]]	[[Original page/lang-xx]] (translated page name)
{{OLPC}} {{Translations}} == Some header == Some text blah... blah... [[#Another header]] ... blah == Another header == Some other text blah... blah... [[Another page]] and [[Another page#section|section]] ... blah	{{OLPC}} {{Translation | lang = xx | source = Original page | version = yyyy}} == Some header == Some text blah... blah... [[#Another header]] ... blah == Another header == Some other text blah... blah... [[Another page]] and [[Another page#section|section]] ... blah

For a full explanation of the parameters, see the Notes below, in short: lang — is the IANA language code (usually 2 letters, without any further segmentation—ie: instead of lang-pt-BR (brazilian portuguese), just lang-pt (portuguese)—just to keep things simple and neutral.

Adding the Ongoing Translation template

[[Original page]]	[[Original page/lang-xx]] (translated page name)
{{OLPC}} {{Translations}} == Some header == Some text blah... blah... [[#Another header]] ... blah == Another header == Some other text blah... blah... [[Another page]] and [[Another page#section|section]] ... blah	{{OLPC}} {{Translation | lang = xx | source = Original page | version = yyyy}} {{Ongoing Translation}} == Some header == Some text blah... blah... [[#Another header]] ... blah == Another header == Some other text blah... blah... [[Another page]] and [[Another page#section|section]] ... blah

The main purpose of the {{Ongoing Translation}} template is to inform the readers that a particular page is still not finished, therefore they can expect the presence of untranslated text or that it hasn't been reviewed enough and thus may not be quite done yet. Parallel to that notice to the reader, it does a grouping of them in the Ongoing Translation category thus allowing other translators to find them and collaborate, review, make comments, etc. on them.

Preserving the section anchors

Many times, when translating you may find links between pages (translated or not) that point to a particular section. When translating this, you may find yourself either ignoring if the target page was translated, under which name if it was so, and last but not least, what is the translated header. That is not to mention the fact that maybe the translated header may be corrected or otherwise changed in future editions.

The solution is to avoid it altogether and let the original structure work for us (or almost).

[[Original page]]	[[Original page/lang-xx]] (translated page name)
{{OLPC}} {{Translations}} == Some header == Some text blah... blah... [[#Another header]] ... blah == Another header == Some other text blah... blah... [[Another page]] and [[Another page#section|section]] ... blah	{{OLPC}} {{Translation | lang = xx | source = Original page | version = yyyy}} {{Ongoing Translation}} {{anchor|Some header}} == Un titular == Some text blah... blah... [[#Another header]] ... blah {{anchor|Another header}} == Otro titular == Some other text blah... blah... [[Another page]] and [[Another page#section|section]] ... blah

Translating text and links

Finally! After all this mumbo-jumbo, the section dealing with the core intent: translate the text!

There are two 'elements' we use to make the translator's life simpler (although sometimes it may not seem so). For starters, the 'source or original' text is embedded in the translated page with the objective of easy reviewing and updating. For that, we use the {{Translated text}} to wrap the original text—the display = parameter controls if it's shown or hidden to the reader/reviewer.

The other aspect of translating a wiki-page is linking the page to the rest of the (hopefully) translated wiki. IOW, the links pointing to other pages of the wiki that may or not have been translated before. After all, we want a reader to keep herself in her 'language of choice' and only fall back to english (or the original page language) when that translated page is not available. In order to do that, the 'translated links' take the shape of [[Another page/lang-xx|visualLinkTranslation]].

[[Original page]]

[[Original page/lang-xx]] (translated page name)

{{OLPC}} {{Translations}} == Some header == Some text blah... blah... [[#Another header]] ... blah == Another header == Some other text blah... blah... [[Another page]] and [[Another page#section|section]] ... blah

{{OLPC}} {{Translation | lang = xx | source = Original page | version = yyyy}} {{Ongoing Translation}} {{anchor|Some header}} == Un titular == Algo de texto bla... bla... [[#Another header|Otro titular]] ... blah {{ Translated text | Some text blah... blah... [[#Another header]] ... blah | display = block}} {{anchor|Another header}} == Otro titular == Algo más de texto bla... bla... [[Another page/lang-xx|Otra página]] y [[Another page/lang-xx#section|sección]] ... bla {{ Translated text | Some other text blah... blah... [[Another page]] and [[Another page#section|section]] ... blah | display = block}}

Note how the links don't really change except for the embedding of the /lang-xx part and the addition of the translated visual of the link (ie: |translated visual]]). The biggest advantage of this technique is that translating a reference is as easy as adding the target language in it and giving it a sensible name to display it.

At the beginning, any link you 'translate' will actually point to a non-existing page, don't worry. Just follow the link and make it look like:

[[Another page/lang-xx]]
#REDIRECT [[Another page]] [[Category:Translations wanted lang-xx]]

This will serve three purposes, first the page will at least take the reader to the right page (albeit not in the correct language). Secondly, the Category will allow a simple way to check 'what is missing'. Finally, and using the What links here from the toolbox you can foind out how many references to the missing page exist, giving some sense of need for it and thus guiding the translating efforts.

Full example of a wiki-page

Anatomy of a wiki-page

This 'sample' page includes all of the elements that require some level of consideration when translating

[[Original page]]

Notes on the structure

{{OLPC}} == Some header == Some text blah... blah... [[#Another header]] ... blah == Another header == Some other text blah... blah... [[Another page]] and [[Another page#section|section]] ... blah

== Some header == section headers act as anchors, and their translation is sensitive as they anchor incomming links. [[#Another header]] intra-page section linking may be simple to maintain as it's within the same page (you can search&replace local references) but will break external inbound links if changed. [[Another page]] the most common problem with links to other pages is to know how the page title has been translated... [[Another page#section|section]] links to specific sections in other pages pose the conflated problem of knowing both the target page name and the section name's translations.

Full finished example

[[Original page]]	[[Original page/lang-xx]] (translated page name)	Translated text deleted... (not really recommended)
{{OLPC}} {{Translations}} == Some header == Some text blah... blah... [[#Another header]] ... blah == Another header == Some other text blah... blah... [[Another page]] and [[Another page#section|section]] ... blah	{{OLPC}} {{Translation | lang = xx | source = Original page | version = yyyy}} {{Ongoing Translation}} {{anchor|Some header}} == Un titular == Algo de texto bla... bla... [[#Another header|Otro titular]] ... blah {{ Translated text | Some text blah... blah... [[#Another header]] ... blah | display = block}} {{anchor|Another header}} == Otro titular == Algo más de texto bla... bla... [[Another page/lang-xx|Otra página]] y [[Another page/lang-xx#section|sección]] ... bla {{ Translated text | Some other text blah... blah... [[Another page]] and [[Another page#section|section]] ... blah | display = block}}	{{OLPC}} {{Translation | lang = xx | source = Original page | version = yyyy}} {{anchor|Some header}} == Un titular == Algo de texto bla... bla... [[#Another header|Otro titular]] ... blah {{anchor|Another header}} == Otro titular == Algo más de texto bla... bla... [[Another page/lang-xx|Otra página]] y [[Another page/lang-xx#section|sección]] ... bla

Supporting pages:

[[Another page/lang-xx]]	[[Another page]]
#REDIRECT [[Another page]] [[Category:Missing translation]]	some untranslated page... maybe the content is mutating rapidly, or is peripheric to the main corpus, etc.

Notes

shortNativeName

should be in the native language; español instead of spanish.

Translation template notes

For the full documentation, please see Template:Translation.

lang

This parameter identifies the target language of the translation. See IANA's lang codes.

It serves several purposes, and is used in several contexts although it should be done in a homogeneous way.

We are currently using ISO 639-1 codes (two-letter codes), although we should probably migrate to 639-3 (three letter codes).

source

is the name of the page (not the link—in other words, without the enclosing square brackets).

version

is a bit of a tricky until you understand it, but extremely helpful.

The number associated with the parameter comes from the original page, and has been made explicit in the blue language navigation bar at its right: [ID# yyyyy].

Pages in the wiki have a numeric id, and each edition creates a new ID. So when you start translating a page, you want to register which version you started from. When at some point the source page is modified, its current version will have a higher version number. If you follow the changes link in the translation blue bar, the system will report all the changes done in that page from the ID# you started from. Once you update the translation, do not forget to update the version # to match the latest sync'ed to number!

So when you compare the differences between two pages, internally you are comparing two IDs between them.

For example this diff is actually comparing two pages, NOT two versions of the same page—admitedly, they are very similar.

Translated text template notes

display

is used to show or hide the enclosed translated text.

While doing the translation, it comes in handy for comparing the original with the translation. When finished, you can replace the block with none and the source text is not displayed. Although it adds quite a bit of text and 'noise' to the source of the translated page, it comes in handy when trying to update or synchronize it with any changes in the original page—after all, this IS a wiki and pages are supposed to mutate!