User:Luna/Full Page Translation Rules

TCRF has many popular (and some less popular) game pages marked for translation into different languages from English, but before you dive head first into translating, it's asked that you read the below guidelines.

Required Reading

Before attempting to use the wiki's translation options, please read through the MediaWiki's Translate extension's documentation.

Required reading for translators are, at the bare minimum, the MediaWiki's translation tutorial and best practices pages.

Proficiency and Machine Translators

To do translations on TCRF, it is asked that you have a high level of proficiency in both the markdown used on the wiki for formatting, templates, and the like, along with a very good understanding of the language you are translating into as well as English. If you do not have good proficiency in a language, it is asked you do not submit translations. TCRF strives to have high quality, natural feeling translations.

As for Machine Translators, if you are proficient enough in a language to be able to recognize the errors a machine translator will make and correct them, they may be used as a supplementary tool. Do not translate pages using the unaltered output of a machine translator. Machine translators will consistently make mistakes with grammar rules, lack of ability to understand context leading to incorrect word choices, and much more. If you are caught translating pages using the direct output of a machine translator, your translations will be deleted and you may find yourself with a temporary ban, or permanent on repeat offences.

Marking Pages for Translation

Before a page can be translated using the tool, it must be marked for translation. This involves both putting special section markers onto a page, but also requires that the page be set to marked by a moderator. Only moderators can follow through on the last step, to allow the translation tool to work. Please do not attempt to create translations for pages that are not yet marked by adding the language code to the page URL. This causes a huge headache when the page is eventually marked for translation, and will mean any work you put into the translation, if done this way, will likely be deleted.

If you'd like to have a page marked for translation, it's recommended that you ask a mod to add the translation markers to the page for you, as the marker system is somewhat complicated and confusing. You can find a list of site moderators here. If you'd still like to try and add them yourself, it's a good idea to read the MediaWiki documentation on this subject, as well as checking out a few TCRF articles that have already been marked.

What to Translate

• All regular text on the page that has been written by TCRF users.

• Page intros, the various sections, subpages of articles, etc.

• Most Templates.

• TCRF heavily uses different templates on pages, from {{WIP}} and {{investigate}}, to the lovely {{bob}} and {{source}}. For most templates, you will want to translate the templates themselves into your language (through the actual template pages themselves), and then call the translated templates with {{[template name]/[language code]}} (e.g. {{source/pl|NASA}} to call the polish version of the source template).

What not to Translate

• Game Names.

• Exception: If there is an official translation of the game into your language that is either done by the developers/publishers or is officially sanctioned by them, you can pull the name from that translation.
• Exception: If the name of the page includes text that is not part of the games title (such as in the case of Pokémon Red and Blue, where the "and" is to denote the page covers multiple variants of the same base game), you may translate the words that are not part of the game name.

• Developer/Publisher Names.

• As per above, do not translate the names of publishers or developers of a game, even if there is an different official name for the developer/publisher in your language. The developer template is not designed for this.

• Text that is stored in game in a specific language.

• Example: Item names, developer messages, internal alphanumerical IDs with words in them, and anything else that is stored in the game in a specific language and is mentioned on a page by it's name as is shown or stored in the game.
• You may, however, provide a translation of such separate from the original mention, with the implementation of doing so being different depending on where the text is. Use common sense when implementing a translation of the existing text; Do it in a way that looks nice on the page. An example of this would be the polish translation of the Mad Professor Mariarti page.
• Exception: For names of items and other similarly end-user visible text, if there is an official translation of such, you may use it.

Special Cases

{{subpage}} Translation

When translating the {{subpage}} template, DO NOT translate the title (the text between the first and second | marks). Instead, add a |tr= onto the end (before the }}) with the translated title. {{subpage|Unused text|tr=Texto sin usar}} becomes:

Texto sin usar

But would link to Help:Contents/Translation Rules/Unused text (when used on translated pages).

{{namespaces}} Translation

{{namespaces}} is a template that points to pages within the same game name in the different namespaces that exist on the wiki (Like Proto: and Prerelease:). To translate this template properly, you need to actually translate the template itself, off page, and then call the translated template in the page. Once the template has been translated, call it on the page with {{namespaces/[language code]}}, as you would any other translated template. Do note, that due to the way {{namespaces}} is supposed to work, if you have not translated the namespace subpages it is pointing to, the space will be blank. This is normal until you translate the associated namespace articles! Please do not attempt to link to the English versions of these pages in the translated version of the article manually, as it leads to requiring a lot of extra cleanup of pages once the namespace articles are translated.

Placeholder Translations

Any translation made solely to translate the article headers is highly discouraged, as it can be considered the equivalent of a placeholder page. These may potentially be deleted if nothing more is done in an extended period of time.

Documentation

The documentation area in the translation tool allows you to add notes as to the context of a certain section or text within said section. Note that the documentation you write here is global (it shows up for all languages in the translation tool), so if you mention something about a specific language's translation, it will also be visible when translating to another. Please only write Documentation in English, as other languages may not be understandable to translators of a different language than yours.