Help:Extension:Translate/Translation best practices

Becoming a good translator needs lots of practice. Many if not most volunteer translations don't have formal translator training. It is no wonder that the quality of many volunteer translated works is sometimes wanting. But even bad translation is almost always better than no translation at all. There are always more translations needed than translators available. For the social aspect, translators should group together and we encourage them to take the ask, don't guess attitude, while translation administrators should be responsive to questions and welcome new translators.

One can become a good translator in specific contexts even without formal training, but it needs many years of experience. It is possible to speed up this process, if we provide direct and constructive feedback through a review process. Even experienced translators can learn and it's always good to have someone else check for spelling errors and such.

But the long journey starts from the basics. Translators should know their own language, the spelling of words and what is considered as good grammar. For small languages that are just starting to use computers and Internet even the way to spell words might still be under discussion. Regardless, translator should be prepared to create something new – there are bound to be words and concepts that not been translated before into their language. And obviously translators should understand enough the language they are translating from.

Getting started
Before starting, make sure you are able to type and read in your language (Chapter 3 of FOSS l10n guide might help). This might involve installing new fonts and keymaps for your computer.

Orient yourself (Chapters 1 and 2 of FOSS l10n guide). You might find many reasons to translate, whether you just do it for fun, hone your skills and accumulate credit or just want to give something back to the causes you support. New translators can find useful tips in Chapter 4 of FOSS l10n guide. You should understand and adopt the core principles of translation like translating the meaning, not word by word, but still trying to be as close as possible to the original text.

Try to join pre-existing translation communities and ask others to review your work. You will encounter non-linguistic markup like variables and wikitext when translating: chapter 7 of FOSS l10n guide gives examples of those. The gist in that is to recognize what parts should be left untranslated and what is the special meaning of them.

Message documentation
The plain source text is not enough to make good translations. This is more relevant in shorter texts, but it applies to all texts. With the Translate extension, along with each message there is a place to provide context and more info for translators; such message documentation is wikitext and can contain anything from links to images. It might take ten minutes to write a good documentation for a message, but that documentation will save each of the potentially hundreds of translators a minute or more and produce higher quality translation, so it's definitely worth it.

It is possible to configure an Ask question button to show up in the translation editor. This provides a low barrier and very direct way for translators to make sure they are doing a good translation, instead of doing a best guess translation. Of course you should make sure that someone will be on the target support page to answer the questions and update the message documentation, or you will only discourage translators.

Consistency
The translation administrators can make glossaries and link them from the group description or use them in message descriptions [i.e. documentation?]. When multiple translators work together, it is crucial that they first of all recognize the terms, and secondly that they use the same translations. When making glossaries, it is a good idea to write a short definition for each term instead of just providing translations. The definition helps translators to understand and apply them better in their translations, and is also a good exercise to improve consistency in source text.