Help:Translating

We are using MediaWiki's [//mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Translate Translate extension] to help with translating pages on the Gentoo Wiki into other languages. It uses a gettext-style message system that breaks up an article into small chunks of text that are easily translatable.

For Editors: Marking translatable sections
Before a page can be translated, you have to mark the translatable sections. In most cases, that is the whole article.

To mark a section as translatable, put it into  XML tags, like this:

Also, add the language selection bar at the top of your article using the  tag:

Once your article has reached completion, you can request translation to be enabled.

For Editors: Requesting page translation
After you completed the previous step (adding the languages and translation tags), the page will automatically be listed in the Page translation page. An administrator or lead translator will check the article quality and approve or deny the request. Make sure to follow the discussion page as this will be used to discuss the reason why a request was denied.

For Anyone: Becoming a translator
We currently have accepted translators for these languages:


 * Chinese (中文)
 * Croatian (hrvatski)
 * Czech (Český jazyk)
 * Dutch (Nederlands)
 * French (français)
 * German (deutsch)
 * Greek (ελληνικά)
 * Italian (italiano)
 * Korean (한국어)
 * Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia)
 * Japanese (日本語)
 * Polish (polski)
 * Portuguese (português)
 * Portuguese (português do Brasil)
 * Russian (русский)
 * Spanish (español)
 * Serbian (српски)
 * Ukranian (українська мова)

If your language is not listed above, that means you are the first translator for a certain language. In this case, please translate this help page first. Please create a page in your user space with a translation of this page. Link to it when requesting a translator account.

When you have completed the task or are not the first translator for your language, add an entry for yourself and your language on the Translator accounts requests page.

For Translators: Translating
To start translating an article, click the Translate this page link below the page title. On the next page, select the language you are translating into in the upper right corner.

You will be presented with a table of translatable paragraphs. Click on the links in the leftmost column to show an input box for your translation. When you are done with the paragraph, click Skip to next translation. When you are done, click Save translation.

Special templates
These templates are translated:


 * Note
 * Warning
 * Important
 * CodeBox
 * FileBox
 * KernelBox

NEW! Templates do not need to be changed, they automatically display translated strings.

If your language is missing, or you want to suggest new Templates to be translatable, contact.

Language code exceptions
For some scripts, there is no usable ISO 639-1 code. These exceptions are used instead:

Language Statistics
You can find a list of pages by filling in your language code at Special:LanguageStats which will by default show you which pages haven't been completely translated yet.