Help:Translating

We are using the TranslateWiki Page translation features to help 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
Look on Gentoo Wiki:Translators. If you are the first translator for a certain language, we have some additional requests for you:
 * Create localized templates: Some templates need localization, specifically Template:Warning, Template:Note, and Template:Important. Copy the contents from each of the templates respectively to a new page called for instance Template:Warning/XY where XY stands for the lowercase two-letter (ISO 639-1) language code for your language and replace the English word Warning with the equivalent in your language. For example, your page should be called Template:Warning/de for a German translation (not Warning/DE!)
 * Translate this help page: 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 yourself to Gentoo_Wiki:Translator_account_requests.

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 a3li

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.