Help talk:Extension:Translate/Translation example

Edit summaries

 * ''For people using the old interface (current as of February/March 2013)

Usually there is no need to add a summary if you are making a new translation, unless you want to clarify some decisions you made in terminology or formatting. When changing existing translations it's polite to mention "Fixed a spelling error" or "Use term X consistently" and so on, to help other translators understand and improve collaboration.

Tone unclear
Right at the top: "The effects will be permanent, so if you don't want to learn how to use it, please stop reading now."

Is this meant humorously? If so, it's the very last place to use a jocular device. I read it three times with knotted brows, wondering what on earth it means. What will potential translators from disparate cultures make of it? Or is it meant seriously, and I'm not getting it? Tony  (talk)  06:07, 4 June 2013 (UTC)


 * It's humorous but also factual, so I don't see what's the problem. It's consistent with the tone of this set of help pages and I also disagree in general that humour doesn't belong to help pages. --Nemo 06:45, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I also aggree it is very strange here. Joking with an unclear context is firstly difficult to understand for a non-native speaker and secondly difficult to translate for translators (the first thing I did when I saw this sentence was to go to the talk page to search explanations), without counting readers who could not catch the joke and be disappointed by this "warning". I vote to remove this sentence. By comparison, the "glorious translator" is surprising but announced in a friendly and clear manner. ~ Seb35 21:14, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

2) [//www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Help%3AExtension%3ATranslate%2FTranslation_example&diff=705601&oldid=705099 of the edit summary] should have been "removing irrelevant statement" but VisualEditor refused to accept further text after I tried to select text of the edit summary. I don't see any reason adding this irrelevant sentence (one expects that a tutorial/documentation is written in such a way that one will able to use the tool afterwards) directly after claiming that "We have a lot of work to do". -- Rillke (talk) 13:36, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see. How is having a lot of work inconsistent? The reason is simple, docs should be a bit light-hearted. --Nemo 15:28, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Your humour is subjective. I just felt annoyed by it. If I want to read humour, I am going to read de:Belletristik ("fiction" would be a fuzzy translation). I also do not agree with your edit summary. The removal was explained and well-justified. Where on MediaWiki, I can ask for a second opinion? -- Rillke (talk) 23:39, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Let me add myself to the list of people who think this "joke" is mostly just confusing. Is the point to make the documentation light-hearted, in order to be welcoming to users? If so, it might have the opposite effect - the text seems more hostile than humorous. Yaron Koren (talk) 15:11, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * You can say that again. From the POV of a translator the documentation is... overcomplicated (to put it mildly), and misses completely on what's important: to explain someone new to wikis how to get things translated with this extension, keeping things simple and to the point. Instead it goes on and on a "joke" that only serves to confuse matters, in pure Wikimedia fashion of filling more and more pages with nonsense and redtape.
 * As not only a translator but also a guy who can document software in the first place, I see there's a ton of documentation on this site that I might update alone. Yesterday I finished translating the whole FAQ to Spanish while at the same time fixing the most obvious problems in the original English doc (broken links and such) and quickly translating some of the docs the FAQ is pointing to - it took me like a week, but fortunately I didn't need to edit any translation-related stuff, so I managed. Next I'd like to take care of the Help: pages as per the PD help plea, but I'm not experienced enough with MediaWiki and besides, there's all this "translate", "tvar" and what else in the middle that makes the source unreadable for me because getting to understand how to use this extension (or rather, how to update source files - I know how to use a GUI, thank you) is much harder than it should. In the meantime, things like Manual:$wgSVGConverter are using a cr*p example that doesn't work and contains stuff that doesn't belong in there in the first place. Guess what's preventing me from fixing it in a matter of minutes? --Tactica amiga (talk) 15:20, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
 * It sounds like you are looking for Help:Extension:Translate/Page_translation_example rather than this tutorial. If that is not the case, it is not clear what I can do to help. --Nikerabbit (talk) 15:42, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
 * What I'm looking for are simple instructions explaining how to make major changes to a translatable page hosted on this site without being a translation admin, using the default editor and while not breaking anything if possible. AFAICS such thing doesn't exist. --Tactica amiga (talk) 16:05, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
 * The tutorial I linked is the best we have. For visual editor, you are correct. Not yet. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131516 --Nikerabbit (talk) 16:14, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Wikitext export
I've moved it to the page for translation admins where the facility is documented. --Nemo 12:14, 9 September 2014 (UTC)