Help:Editing/Alternative Languages
This page is a reference on having alternative languages in the wiki. Translating the page you want should be simple if you are fluent in a language.
Contents
Titles
It is important that all page names contain only ASCII characters, otherwise the pages aren't handled correctly by the database. The name of a translated page should put the English name first, followed by a colon (:), followed by the language's ISO_639-2 abbreviation. An example of a proper page name is Help:Contents:ru. It is not a problem to use non-English text in the pages themselves, but the name of the page cannot contain any non-English, non ASCII characters.
English pages are usually the originals and there is no :en tag on them.
There are two ways to change how a page title will appear to readers without affecting the URL.
- Template:Lang
{{DISPLAYTITLE:title}}- this is not a template, rather a magic word to change the page title to whatever you want. All the templates listed use this internally.
Linking to pages in another language
Template:Lang will automatically detect when a page is available in other languages, and creates a row of flags linking to the page in each language. It assumes that the page names follow the naming scheme described above. See the template's page for full details.
Templates
Templates containing text visible on content pages should have that text translated into the translated page's language before the page is considered finished. Any documentation on the template should also be translated.
Templates without visible text may also have their documentation translated. If the template itself is identical to the English one however, the "translated" template should not be used on pages, because then if one version of the template is changed, it creates a needless hassle to change other versions as well, even though the templates are identical.
Categories
Categories also need to be separated by language, because adding a translated page to a category in another language only makes the category become cluttered.
Language checklist
Every language on the wiki should have:
- A language category.
- Translations for all the pages in the left sidebar.
- An icon of a flag representative of the language.
- Proper addition to Template:Lang
Final notes
This guide is not definitive, but it makes things much simpler when everyone follows one method of translating content, so everything in the wiki stays consistent throughout languages.
Please fully translate pages. A page partially in another language is simply not helpful for readers who only know one language.
If a page has received an important update, translations of the page should be marked with Template:UpdateTranslation.