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[wiki] TextBook Translation -- Needs Attention
For those who work on translating wiki content, including historical Translation Reps, there are two important changes to bring to your attention, and thus which should encourage you to help make things better.
TRANSLATED PAGE TITLES
The language entries in the database that trigger the ability to make contextual (mirror) links between English pages and their translated versions have been revised so that page titles are not automatically prefixed with the two-character code of the language. (Note: This does not effect how you add the mirror links at the bottom of pages using the two-character code — that remains the same.)
For example (using French to demonstrate), gone are the days when a language link tag like [[fr:Page d’accueil]] would produce Fr/Page d’accueil as a wiki page title. Instead, the “Fr/” will not automatically be prefixed to the title; the title will simply be Page d’accueil. Same holds true for page translations in other languages.
The benefits of this should be obvious; to the person reading the given language, it’s a nicer/cleaner title (they don’t need the two-character code to tell them the title is in a language they understand, after all). To anyone else it doesn’t make any difference because they presumably can’t read the alternate language anyway. This also makes it possible for the wiki to alphabetize these pages more logically in context of alternate language categories — such as the Tag Reference — should translators ever get that far.
Here’s the rub (there’s always a rub): by making the positive change, we have broken the mirror links that existed in the wiki. The links revert to the new format (without the two-character code prefixes), thus behave like they are pointing to new pages that need created (which is true; see more reasons why below). The old pages still exist in the All Pages (“main:” namespace), so the content is traceable.
WIKI CONTENT RESTRUCTURE
If you haven’t noticed already, the wiki is undergoing a restructure in both organization and page content. At the English page level, this means pages may have been retitled, broken into multiples pages (to break out separate topics and make them more indexable), or completely rewritten to improve quality and understanding. As such, it is very likely that translated content no longer matches English content in one or more of three ways: 1) disparate titles, 2) dissimilar content, or 3) completely obsolete.
What does this all mean? Now is a good time to renew translation efforts and make things better!
Translation documentation has been revised to make what few protocols exist more clear. Begin with help:Translating Wiki Content and see the other translation help articles linked in the yellow contextual box list. Ask questions here in the TextBook forum if you have any.
In short, you need to start from the English Index (main) page and go from there. A top down approach like that is the only way to ensure old translated efforts are taken into account as much as possible. The key things are:
- Ensure that page titles appearing in mirror links are accurate translations against the English page. These will all lead to empty pages, but make sure the link titles are accurate translations before saving new content in them.
- Go to All Pages to track down the old translated page that was formerly linked there under the old title convention (explained in the section above). Copy/past the content into the new page having the mirror link with the English content.
- Do not use the “move” feature to try and re-title pages. Recreate clean! The wiki’s English architecture has changed to such a degree that redirecting pages would be pointless anyway. Further, having tons of redirect pages in the wiki lends no help to making the wiki more usable, which is what this is all about.
- (Sysops/Translation Reps) After recreating a page, delete the old page from the wiki so it’s not clogging up the All Pages (“main:” namespace) with garbage. (Sometimes you’ll discover old redirect pages by doing this; delete those too!) If you’re unsure or need help, make a request in this thread!
- Ensure content of your newly created pages is brought current against the English version (naturally).
NOTES
I can help out with the French content, but that’s where it stops for me; thus it’s imperative other language speakers lend a hand in this sooner than later.
I would propose this post gets translated and added to each of our international forums, respectively, so more real people-power sees the situation and perhaps gets involved. Who knows, maybe we’ll see a big burst in translation efforts beyond what we’ve had before now that the wiki is shaping up.
@Patrick: With regard to adding new languages to the database, the new instructs are detailed in the admin doc help:Adding New Translation Languages.
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Re: [wiki] TextBook Translation -- Needs Attention
Without actually editing any French content yet, which is a very low priority for me at this point (and I’m probably not the right person anyway), I did go through all the old French pages, following the general guides noted above. What I found was that most of them were junk anyway; translations of old English pages that were themselves obsolete and deleted.
I also see a lot of pages where character encoding is scrambled…an artifact of when the server changes were made a year or two ago. These could be fixed by find/replace, but again, there’s not much point as they are translations of English content that has since evolved or disappeared.
My point: translators should be very generous with just killing pages and starting fresh. Perhaps not everywhere, but in a lot of cases. This will save you a lot of hair-pulling too. If you don’t see an English page mirrored with one translated, or it’s so radically different in content that yoiu would be re-writing it anyway, just delete your native page in question (or make them known here so an admin can do it if you technically can’t).
I would also like to hear suggestions about how to keep translators better informed of English pages that are updated/revised over time so they know to make similar editions to the translated versions. The wiki provides an RSS/Atom links on the “Recent Changes” and “New Pages” feeds, but that’s certainly not an end-all solution. This was the main reason behind having language reps (the idea started way back in the beginning) but that’s never really been a successful process.
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