Help:CentralNotice/Translations

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Abstract

In 2013, the fundraising team rolled out changes to CentralNotice that altered how translations are managed for banners. Previously CentralNotice rolled its own translation system; now we are using the Translate extension. Fundamentally this means that anyone is able to contribute translations to a banner; however, only admins are allowed to push new translations to a banner (by setting them to the 'Published' state).

Feedback

Please give us feedback on this talk page directly.

Message Translation Usage

• Messages are still created in a banner using the {{{MessageName}}} syntax
• English text for messages is entered in the usual manner -- ie: in the message boxes above the banner
  • Submitting the English text message will also create the English message and QQQ message under a new CNBanner namespace for translators to work on.
  • English and QQQ messages should only be modified in the CentralNotice interface -- they are protected in the CNBanner namespace (though if you have the permissions, editing them here won't actually cause problems, just a bit of confusion)
• Clicking on the message link in the UI will load the translation UI with all available messages loaded.
  • Then edit the translated message and click save!
  • Messages go through the standard translation workflow; edit/review/publish as normal.
  • As soon a message has been set to the 'Published' state, CentralNotice will import that translation and it will go live in any banner using it
• Existing banner translations using the 'old' system were not affected by the change, but neither were they imported into the 'new' system -- it will appear as though they have no translated messages. At the moment there is no plan on importing them into the new system.
• Cloning a banner will also clone its existing translations.

Priority Languages

Priority languages are a method of hinting to translators what messages need to be translated. Therefore, if you are only targeting English, German, French, and Russian; only set those languages as priority. In the translation UI, a big yellow box is presented that informs that they are trying to translate a non priority language if not in the previously stated languages. (Note: this will not prevent them from translating the messages if they choose, but it's good karma.)

Message Fallbacks [Phabricator: T3495]

As part of this development effort MediaWiki core (and by extension CentralNotice) now supports language fallbacks in messages. This means that if a user has the interface language set to 'de-formal' they will get 'de' messages when they are not defined in 'de-formal' but are defined in 'de'.

Note As of January 2013, the patch that implements this, 44224, has only just been approved for merge into core. Therefore this is not yet active.

However, a different patch which removes languages like be-x-old has been merged, 35383. See also Talk:CentralNotice#Notice_for_CentralNotice_administrators for more discussion on this topic.

Language Conversion

After gerrit:67629 and gerrit:67399 are merged and $wgNoticeUseLanguageConversion is set to true, all localized messages in the following language list will be ignored (which have already been blacklisted for translation in gerrit:63678 / phab:T39338). Banners for these languages will have messages fetched from languages listed in parentheses instead, and get converted to requested variant after rendering, avoiding more duplicated manual translating work.

• (gan) gan-hans, gan-hant
• (iu) ike-cans, ike-latn
• (kk) kk-cyrl, kk-latn, kk-arab, kk-kz, kk-tr, kk-cn
• (ku) ku-arab, ku-latn
• (shi) shi-tfng, shi-latn
• (sr) sr-ec, sr-el
• (tg) tg-latn
• (uz) uz-latn, uz-cyrl
• (zh) zh-hans, zh-hant, zh-cn, zh-hk, zh-mo, zh-my, zh-sg, zh-tw

Here is a checklist before $wgNoticeUseLanguageConversion is turned on:

• Make sure there's no existing code snippet in banners which conflicts with the conversion syntax, basically -{ }-.
• Have messages for any banner to be used in the future in those languages listed in parentheses above filled. Most of them may be just moved from a variant language subpage.

Translation notifications

It is currently not possible to send translators a notification about banners in need of translation. Translators should be addressed individually and links to translate the text should be provided in the banner. The campaing manager should check regularly if new translations have been added and publish them if they've been reviewed or the manager knows the language. This is especially true for banners that affect all languages/countries.