ArchWiki:Translation Team

From ArchWiki

This article or section needs language, wiki syntax or style improvements. See Help:Style for reference.

Reason: Instructions lack clarity (Discuss in ArchWiki talk:Translation Team)
Note: Disambiguation pages should not be translated.

Create a new page and its translation

Tip: DeepL can be used for machine-assisted translations, which save a great amount of time, if it supports the target language. Make sure to proofread everything if you use it.

Choose a page to translate

Note: Before starting a new page to translate, check if you are interested with translations marked by Template:Bad translation and Template:Translateme. Help improving existing translation first to get yourself familiar with the process.

You can find pages to translate through below methods:

Let us take this very page as an example: ArchWiki Translation Team.

Determine the new page title

Page titles of all i18n pages should follow Help:i18n#Page titles. If you are not familiar with the exact rule, you can use below method to get the page name:

  1. At the top of the English page, click the Edit tab in the horizontal menu.
  2. Add an interlanguage link for the language you are going to create, but do not save the page yet.
  3. Preview the page with the new interlanguage link.
  4. Visit the interlanguage link you have just created which will lead you to ArchWiki Translation Team (Language) (open new tab, do not close preview page), where "Language" is the language name associated with the translation you are about to create.
    Note: If you have Show preview without reloading the page checked in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-preview, the interlanguage link will not appear in the preview.
  5. Since the new page does not exist, create it by clicking on Create in the horizontal menu.
Note: If the page already exists because it was redirected to the English version due to being a bad translation, check the revision history to find out what it lacked and replace the redirect with your translation. Depending on how insufficient the old translation was, you might be able to salvage parts of it to save some time.

Translate content

  1. Copy entire source code of the English page.
  2. You will be shown a simple text editor. Paste here the source code of the page you copied earlier.
  3. Localize the Category links. For example, change [[Category:ArchWiki]] to [[Category:ArchWiki (Language)]]. See Help:Category for more information.
  4. Add an interlanguage link to the article from which you are translating. If you added an interlanguage link to the new page before copying the source code of the English page, remove it from the source code of the new page.
  5. Translate the copied page text and save everything, also adding a proper edit summary such as translate [[ArchWiki Translation Team]].
  6. At the top of the translated page, there is a list of categories the page is included in. Check that all these categories exist, i.e. the links should not be red. Otherwise create all missing categories following the red links - categories are created the same way as regular pages.
  7. Add Template:TranslationStatus to the translated page. For usage, see Template:TranslationStatus#Usage.
  8. (optional) Create another page, e.g. Translated title of ArchWiki Translation Team, whose title will be a localized version of ArchWiki Translation Team (Language). Enter #redirect [[ArchWiki Translation Team (Language)]] as its only content and save it.

Add interlanguage link

Return to the English page. Add Help:i18n#Interlanguage links and save it this time. If the page is protected, leave a request in its talk page instead. A maintainer will add the interlanguage link for you.

Maintaining translations

Use Template:TranslationStatus to make it easier keeping track of any untranslated new changes.

Special attention should be paid to important articles such as the Installation guide, Arch Linux and similar. English typo fixes, which are not part of e.g a command or its output, do not have to apply to your translation can usually be safely ignored.

Translations of new content do not have to happen immediately. Since reverts can happen quite frequently, you are free to wait before translating potentially low quality or dubious edits to not spend time on something that will be undone eventually.

Dealing with old translations

Unfortunately, there are many outdated or insufficient translations. If you find any of these, flag them with either Template:Translateme or Template:Bad translation if they have not been flagged yet. The former is used on translations which are not yet critically outdated. Change Template:Translateme to Template:Bad translation if the translation has become critically outdated.

If a bad translation has been flagged for a while, preferably 6-12 months, but no one updated it, you may redirect it to the English article. You may redirect translations without flagging first when they:

  • Contain dangerous information (includes but is not limited to destructive commands or wrong/missing security-related instructions).
  • Have been obviously abandoned since its creation (which has to be at least 2 years ago, to give translators plenty of time).
    • You may ignore later minor edits not related to the translation (bot edits, changing categories, fixing grammar and so on) to determine if a translation has been abandoned.
  • Are ancient (last translated over 5 years ago and is significantly out of sync with the English page).

This does only partially apply to small articles where only the English version is rarely updated. If the translation is fine but only contains e.g one critically outdated command, fix it instead of redirecting.

Templates that can be translated

The following table lists all templates that may be translated. Translations of this section should add a column to the table linking their translated templates in their preferred usage form (possibly using Template redirects).

English template
Article templates
Template:Related articles start
Template:Unsupported
Template:Yes
Template:No
Template:Tip
Template:Note
Template:Warning
Template:Dead link
Template:Broken package link
Template:Broken section link
Translation status templates
Template:Bad translation
Template:Translateme
Template:TranslationStatus
Navigation templates
Template:Laptops table header
Template:Laptops navigation
Template:List of applications navigation
Template:Package guidelines
Special templates
Template:Cat main
Template:Template
Template:META Error
Template:META Unexplained Status Template
Template:Comment
Template:Committed identity
Template:Unsigned

Templates that should be omitted from translations

When page or section is flagged with Template:Accuracy, Template:Style, Template:Archive, Template:Remove or Template:Out of date — do not translate pages/sections in question until offending issues have been fixed and template removed.

If you see Template:Expansion, Template:Merge, Template:Move or Template:Redirect you can safely translate the page, but do not copy these templates over to the translated article.

If you see Template:Broken package link, Template:Broken section link or Template:Dead link, do not copy those templates over to the translated article. Either fix them in original text, then copy and/or translate fixed links, or omit whole sentence or section concerning them when translating.

Page list

List here articles that only exist in non-English languages, or that exist in English but are either not fully translated, or are in a worse state than the non-English version. Keep alphabetical order.

Page Language Notes
Alfis (Русский) Russian
Apache OpenMeetings (Русский) Russian
Localization (正體中文)/Traditional Chinese (正體中文) Chinese (Traditional)
Kubeadm (Français) Français