Online Manual:Translation Portal

This is the project page for translators of the SMF Wiki. Translators can check in here to find out what they can do. If you have any questions about this information, or suggestions for improving this page, please discuss in the Doc Helpers Board.

Languages to Translate

Below is a list of the 40 languages which SMF has been translated into. The links show the percentage of the Wiki translation completed in the Translation Extension for each language. This is the place to check to see what still needs to be translated (ignore the top two Mediawiki entries as they are for the Wiki interface). If the English text of these pages is modified, translations may need to be updated, so also please keep checking for updates from the Documentation Team in the Documentation Help board regarding changes to these pages. If the language you are interested in translating is not in the following list please notify the Doc Team by posting in the Documentation Help board.

Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Esperanto Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hungarian Indonesian Italian

Japanese Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Cyrillic Serbian Latin Slovak Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese

How to Translate these Pages

These translations are being done using a wiki extension called the Translate Extension, provided by the translatewiki team. You can start translating pages by clicking on the page title in the statistics page for your language as listed above. Otherwise, go to the English source page to be translated (currently pages from the category As a regular user) - if you have permission to translate, you will see a link titled "Translate this page" above the content of the page. Follow the link to the Translate form. You'll see the page's name listed in "Group". Choose the language from the drop-down list, and hit the "Fetch" button.

You will see all the language strings which need to be translated. The translation tool calls them messages. The link for the language message is on the left, and the content is on the right. Click on the link to start an editing window for that message. Above the editing window, you will see the source text, labeled "Message definition". In the textarea below, you may begin typing in the translation. If you wish, enter a Summary to describe the changes you have made. When you have completed translating the language message, you must use the "Save page" button to save the language message you are editing on this page.

IMPORTANT:

• When translating, you must always include all the Wiki code. For example, if you see ==Profile Information==, then make sure you include all the equal signs (==) as these indicate that it is a heading. For further information about Wiki code, take a look at the Wikipedia Cheatsheet.

• After saving the translation of a unit, always check whether there is a warning below the translated text. The Translate Extension may have found some inconsistencies in your translation compared to the English source version. In this case you must update the translation and save the changes.

Translating Links

The standard method for creating Wikilinks doesn't work very well in the Translation Extension, so the llink template method is used instead.

• Linking to another wiki page:

English version:{{llink|Main menu|text=Main menu}}
Esperanto version:{{llink|Main menu|text=ĉefa menuo}}

"Main menu" is the name of the original English version of the page. You should never translate this as the llink template will automatically redirect users to the translated version. You should however translate the part after text=. In the example, the Esperanto translation "ĉefa menuo" has been entered.

• Linking to a certain section of another wiki page:

English version: {{llink|Profile|anchor=Personal_Messaging|text=Personal Message Options}}
Dutch version: {{llink|Profile|anchor=Persoonlijke_berichten|text=Persoonlijke berichten opties}}

Again, don't translate the English name of the original page ("Profile" in this case). But do translate the words after text=, as these are the words that will appear in the link on the page. The anchor= marks the part of the Profile page that the link will lead to. The target of anchor= has to be changed in order to work correctly on the translated page. For example, in the case of the Dutch translation it has to be changed to anchor=Persoonlijke_berichten. You can discover what to enter after anchor= by going to the translated version of the page (in this case, Profile), then click on the the translated title of Personal Messaging in the Table of Contents. You will then see the required text in the address bar of your browser, the part after the hash sign (#). For example, in the case of the Dutch version:

http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Profile/nl#Persoonlijke_berichten

Note that for languages which use certain special characters, the text after the above hash sign might have been automatically converted into a compatible format, which might seem a little confusing at first. For example, in the case of Esperanto, the above link appears as ...#Privataj_mesa.C4.9Doj rather than ...#Privataj_mesaĝoj. Make sure that you use the converted form.

!!FUZZY!!

If you come across !!FUZZY!! in one of the translation units, this indicates that the Doc Team has manually highlighted it to be checked by a translator. Compare the existing translation with the English version, noting any changes that may have occured to the source English text. Once you are satisfied with the translation you can simply delete !!FUZZY!! (and the line it's on) and then save. The unit will then be registered as translated.

Translating Templates

The instructions for translating a template should be found on the template itself. For example, take a look at Template:Version_specific (scroll down to the section "How to translate this template"). Be careful to follow the notes accurately and translate only the necessary parts. Don't alter any code or other text in the template because that will break it.

A list of the templates ready for translation can be found in the Category:Translatable templates

Why Templates and How to Work with Them

In the case of the Version Specific template it is used to create the coloured boxes that highlight version specific features. These boxes require quite a lot of code, so instead of pasting all this code into every page where it is needed, a template is used instead. This particular template is used on a page by adding:

{{ {{Localized|Version specific}}|small=yes|version=2.0|content=
Translate the text here. }}

In the above make sure that you translate only the part marked "Translate the text here". Leave everything else as it is and check that the final brackets are included after your translation because they close the box.

For further information about templates, please see the Wikimedia Quick Guide to Templates.