Online Manual:Translation Portal

This is a project page for Translators. 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 at Online Manual talk:Translation Portal

Languages to Translate

Below is a list of the percentage of translation which been carried out for the pages that use the translation extension of each of the 40 languages which SMF has been translated into. This is the place to check to see what still needs to be translated. 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 [url=http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?board=202.0]Documentation Help[/url] board regarding changes to these pages. If the language you are interested in translating is not in this list feel free to contact the Documentation team at the above email address and let us know which language you want to translate and we will work with you on seeing if you can add it.

• Albanian
• Arabic
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• German
• Esperanto
• Finnish
• French
• Galician
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Lithuanian
• Macedonian
• Malay
• Norwegian
• Persian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian Cyrillic ekavian
• Serbian Latin ekavian
• Simplified Chinese
• Traditional Chinese
• Slovak
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Urdu
• Vietnamese

Pages Ready for Translation

These pages appear in the new help tab, and are ready for translation. As soon as you save a translation message (like a language string), it will immediately be available to all users of the wiki and the new help tab.

• Registering - Many forums require users to register to gain full access.
• Posting - The whole point of a forum, posting allows users to express themselves.
• Search - Searching is an extremely helpful tool for finding information in posts and topics.
• Logging In - After registering you need to login to really gain full access to the forum.
• Bulletin Board Code - Posts can be spiced up with a little BBC.
• Memberlist - The memberlist shows all the members of a forum.
• Features- Here is a list of the most popular features in SMF.
• Profile - Each member has their own personal profile.
• Calendar - Users can keep track of events, holidays, and birthdays with the calendar.
• Personal messages - Users can send personal messages to each other.

How to translate these pages

These translations will be done using a wiki extension called the Translate extension, provided by the translatewiki team. To begin, go to the base page to be translated. If you have permission to translate, you will see a link titled "Translate this page" before 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 discribe 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.

For more information on translating, please see the Page translation feature documentation from the translatewiki team

Note about links translation - Unfortunately at the moment the only way to have translations not marked as outdated by the extension is to use the english form of the link (i.e. without any language code like en, it, fr, etc. at the end). A "special case" that should be handled by the extension, but apparently is not, are intra-page anchors (e.g. [[#Pages Ready for Translation]]) in that cases the anchor must be translated, but the extension will outline the sentence containing it as outdated (see this page to have an idea of the result). For the time being let's live with it, eventually we will find the cause and fix it.

What to do about wiki links -- the llink template

Sometimes, wikilinks cause problems during the translation. They make the translation look like it is not complete, even when it is. That is why, instead of [[Profile/#Account_Settings|Profile > Modify Account > Account Settings]] we will use {{llink|Profile|anchor=Account_Settings|text=Profile > Modify Account > Account Settings}}

This llink wiki template will itself take care of pointing at the correct document. You may need to help it with the anchor part of the document -- this should be one of the headings in the document in your own language. You should change the text following anchor= to match the correct section heading in the target document, as it is translated into the same language you are currently translating. You may also translate the text following text=.

How to translate a template

In wikimedia a template is a special page that can be used within other pages to repeat consistently informations and/or structures (e.g. boxes like Template:Version specific). Templates can contain HTML, formatting entities, logical constructs and of course text. HTML, formatting and logical operators must not be translated, while text should be.

The translation of a template follows a different approach then the translation of a normal page.

• Create a new sub-page of the template.
  The first step is create a new sub-page of the template. The name of this sub-page must correspond to the code of the language you want to translate the template to (we will provide a list of codes as soon as possible, in the meantime you will find few links already created in each updated template).
  Example: For the template Template:Add_new_template_translation , you can see the existing subpages at Special:PrefixIndex/Template:Add_new_template_translation/. Here's how the /it sub-page was created
  1. Go to the template. You'll find it at http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Template:Add_new_template_translation
  2. Edit the address bar on your browser. Add a slash, followed by the correct language code. For italian, this was done by adding /it, so the address bar now said http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Template:Add_new_template_translation/it
• Copy the entire template to the sub-page.
  1. Now, at the template's base page (for example, http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Template:Add_new_template_translation), use the "edit" or "view source" button to see the complete source of the base page. Copy all of this
  2. If the translated template sub-page already exists, you should see an "edit link" (for example, at http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Template:Add_new_template_translation/it). If it does not yet exist, you will see a message such as "There is currently no text in this page. .... edit this page". This is the English-language version of the message. The actual message content may depend on the localization settings you have chosen on the wiki. Follow the link to edit this page.
  3. Paste the content you copied from the template's base page into the sub-page you are creating.
• Translate ONLY the text that needs to be translated, and keep everything else just as it was. Complex templates will be marked up with contents to tell where to begin and end translation (<!-- start translate -->) and the end (<!-- stop translate -->).
• A list of the templates ready for translation can be found in the Category:Translatable templates

Tips and trick about translations

Headlines, templates, other formatting and line spacing

Just noticed:

{{Other languages}}
{{TOCright}}
<translate><!--T:1-->
===View All Members===

will result in the headline no being properly displayed in translated pages (i.e. the triple equals doesn't get translated to a heading and remains as it is). To solve the issue, please use an empty line between the last template and the translate tag:

{{Other languages}}
{{TOCright}}

<translate><!--T:1-->
===View All Members===

The same applies to any kind of text: always leave a white line between the templates at the beginning of the page and the translate tag.

Redirects

Once a page is marked for translation is impossible to "revoke" this mark and let the page behave like a normal one. The same applies to redirects too.
But redirects are more complicated: for example if the content of a page (let's say page_A) is moved to another page (page_B for this example), page_A is redirected to page_B and page_B is marked for translation, the translate extension will show the entries twice. Additionally if a placeholder is used in the redirect (e.g.   in page_A) and is marked for translation, for sure if the id of the translation unit is the same as one of the ids in page_B there will be problems in particular while translating the unit with the same name.

The workaround used temporarily is to avoid the redirect and use a message in the page that should contain the redirect with a link to the new page and being sure that there are no conflicts between .

Alternative solution to be tested
Use a placeholder in the redirect page and name the translation unit something totally different from any other unit in the proper page.