Localisation

The MediaWiki interface can be fully translated to any language. This page will explain to you how it was done before, how it should be done now and how you can help the translation effort.

History
With MediaWiki 1.3.0 a new system has been set up for localizing MediaWiki. Instead of editing the language file and asking developers to apply the change, users can now edit the interface strings directly from their wikis. This is the system in use as of August 2005. People can find the message they want to translate in Special:Allmessages and then edit the relevant string in the MediaWiki: namespace. Once edited, these changes are live. There is no more need to request an update, and wait for developers to check and update the file.

The system is great for Wikipedia projects; however a side effect is that the MediaWiki language files shipped with the software are no longer quite up-to-date, and it is harder for developers to keep the files on meta in sync with the real language files.

As the default language files do not provide enough translated material, we face two problems:
 * 1) New Wikimedia projects created in a language which have not been updated for a long time, need a total re-translation of the interface.
 * 2) Other users of MediaWiki [not Wikimedia projects] are left with untranslated interfaces. This is especially unfortunate for the smaller languages which don't have many translators.

This is not such a big issue anymore, because translatewiki.net is advertised prominently and used by almost all translations. Local translations still do happen sometimes.

translatewiki.net
translatewiki.net supports in-wiki translation of the complete interface. If you would like to have nothing to do with all the technicalities of editing files, subversion, creating patches, this is the place for you. Even if you can work with the process, you should consider trading some personal efficiency for benefit of a group. Please visit translatewiki.net, create an account and request translator privileges.

Subversion and Bugzilla
Only few languages are maintained by translators (Hebrew, some Chinese languages), who commit directly to MediaWiki svn repository. All new efforts should go trough translatewiki.net

Subscribe to i18n mailinglist
You can subscribe i18n list, but at the moment it is very low traffic (almost none). http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n

License
Any edits made to the language must be licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (and GFDL?) to be included in the MediaWiki software.