Translatewiki.net

translatewiki.net is a localisation platform for translation communities, language communities, and free software projects. It started out with localisation for MediaWiki. Later support for MediaWiki extensions, FreeCol, OpenStreetMap, Etherpad Lite and other free software projects was added.

Over 300 localisations of MediaWiki and its extensions use translatewiki.net as a convenient translation medium, as well as for coordination and maintenance. Mantis, FreeCol and Mwlib.rl can also be translated in translatewiki.net. More projects are welcome.

You can participate in the translation effort into a language you know. The translations of the MediaWiki interface into new languages for requested projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are also done there.

This project is not part of the Wikimedia Foundation projects, but it is supported by the Wikimedia Language team and volunteers. Translatewiki.net is an associated project of non-profit fiscal sponsor called Software in the Public Interest. The translation functionality is provided by a MediaWiki extension.


 * Interwiki link format:

translatewiki.net and MediaWiki
translatewiki.net supports in-wiki translation of all the messages of core MediaWiki, extensions and skins. All translation of MediaWiki user interface messages should go through translatewiki.net and not committed directly to code. Only the English messages and their initial documentation must be done in the source code.

Core MediaWiki and extensions must use system messages for any text displayed in the user interface. For an example of how to do this, please see Manual:Special pages. If the extension is well written, it will probably be included in translatewiki.net in a few days, after its staff notices it on Gerrit. If it's not noticed, contact them. If it's too unstable to be translated, note so in the code or commit and contact them if necessary.

Handling support requests
Translators may have questions about some of the messages you create. Translatewiki.net provides a support request system that allows translators the ability to ask you, the project owner, questions regarding messages so that they can be better translated. This short tutorial guides you through the workflow of handling translatewiki.net support requests.

Localisation update workflow
As mentioned above, translation happens on translatewiki.net and other systems are discouraged. Here's a high level overview of the localisation update workflow:


 * Developers add or change system messages.
 * Users translate the new or changed system messages on translatewiki.net.
 * Automated tools export these messages, build new versions of the message files, incorporating the added or updated messages, for both core and extensions, and commit them to git.
 * The wikis then can pull in the updated system messages from the git repository.

Wikimedia projects and any other wikis can benefit immediately and automatically from localisation work thanks to the extension. This compares the latest English messages to the English messages in production. If they are not the same, the production translations are updated and made available to users.

Once translations are in the version control system, the Wikimedia Foundation has a daily job that updates a checkout or clone of the extension repository. This was first established in September 2009.

Because changes on translatewiki.net are pushed to the code daily as well, this means that each change to a message can potentially be applied to all existing MediaWiki installations in a couple days without any manual intervention or traumatic code update.

As you can see this is a multi-step process. Over time, we have found out that many things can go wrong. If you think the process is broken, please make sure to report it on our Support page, or create a new bug in Phabricator. Always be sure to describe a precise observation.

Links

 * translatewiki.net
 * translatewiki:Translating:Localisation for developers
 * translatewiki/ - Public configuration repository
 * On Phabricator
 * Localisation landing page