Help:Translating

MediaWiki's Translate extension is used 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, 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 the article, using the  tag:

Once an article has reached completion, issue a translation request for translation to be enabled.

For Editors: Requesting page translation
After the previous steps (adding the "languages" and "translate" 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
Requesting to translate pages on the wiki is relatively straightforward. For languages that are already translated, simply add an entry on the translator accounts requests page, using a standard wiki account, and wait for a response.

To translate articles for a new language, please start by translating this help page in user space. Go to the user page for the account requesting to become a translator, and in the URL bar, add a slash and the name of the new page, as such: "/User:Larry/Translating_Esperanto". Click the "create this page" link, and publish the new translation there. When  requesting a translator account, link to the new translation.

There are currently translators for the following languages:


 * Catalan‎ (català)
 * 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)
 * Persian (فارسی)
 * Polish (polski)
 * Portuguese (português)
 * Portuguese (português do Brasil)
 * Russian (русский)
 * Spanish (español)
 * Serbian (српски)
 * Ukranian (українська мова)
 * Turkish (Türkçe)

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 in the upper right corner.

This will show a table of translatable paragraphs. Click on the links in the leftmost column to show an input box for translation. After finishing a paragraph, click Skip to next translation. To finish, 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 a language is missing, or to suggest new Templates to become translatable, contact the wiki project.

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

Language Statistics
A list of pages not completely translated can be found by filling in a language code at Special:LanguageStats.