Translating Wikidot has been a hot topic in the last week or two and today we want to make a sort of sum up and thank you note about it.
We'd like to thank very, very much for all that contributed their time to translate lots of boring and often problematic English messages to their native language. We've seen a lot of hard decisions being made, a lot of work with rewriting the translation, while we were fixing translation mistakes in English messages and still, much, much of enthusiasm while improving Wikidot international communicativeness.
We already credited the users that made the most complete translations: German, French and Serbian. We really keep our fingers crossed for Finnish translation. To express how much we appreciate the work you've done, we decided to give away one-year Pro+ accounts (one-year prolongations for those who already have them) to:
- Brunhilda and Shomi for a complete Serbian translation
- fridemar, StefanM and Helmuti_pdorf does not match any existing user name for complete German translation
- gerdami who made French translation basically by his own
- and jjs that made 62.8% of Finnish translation (and still counting)
Here's the statistics for all translations (as of 20th January 2011):
For almost-real-time statistics, visit the Transate site.
Setting language for your site
Now that we have at least 4 complete language versions of Wikidot, it's time to present how to set your site's language. Go to the Manage Site (if your link is lost use http://your-site.wikidot.com/admin:manage):
In the General settings tab, locate the Language selector:
Choose the desired language, refresh the page, and you're done! In case the translation is not what you expected (not complete, has mistakes), you can go back and select English, but we suggest that you should go to translate.wikidot.com and improve the translation instead! Any translations you make there will be shown on your site soon afterwards.
The photo comes from Flickr
Wow, thanks!! I promise I'll finish the Finnish translation :)
___TTT___/ http://www.trumpetexercises.net
(_|||_) \ - Janne
Thanks as well.
However, the work is not over. Missing translation of sentences. Brunhilda already told that.
And the documentation ?
I started, a long time ago, a mockup of a multilingual doc at http://babel-doc.wikidot.com/fr:modules, based on the first version of James Kanjo's http://doc.wikidot.com/module:_start, but with categories for languages. See also http://doc.wikidot.com/syntax:_start where syntax elements are hosted on their own pages.
So, what are your thoughts on this ?
good job, guys! i'll hopefully start on the (brazilian) portuguese version soon.
Eduardo R. Ribeiro
http://www.etnolinguistica.org
Just thinking out loud a little… With this wiki, interactive way of translating Wikidot's interface, it seems it would be much easier to create websites in minority languages (by which I mean really tiny speech communities, as it is the case of most indigenous languages in Latin America). Is that a unique Wikidot feature? I remember, a few years ago (before I came into Wikidot), I was contemplating the possibility of creating an encyclopedia in Karajá (an indigenous language spoken by around 3 thousand people in Brazil) but was discouraged by the fact that the interface would still remain in Portuguese. If one can translate the interface into any language, no matter how "small", that is certainly great news!
Eduardo R. Ribeiro
http://www.etnolinguistica.org
Having sites translated into such indigenous languages would make Wikidot rather special. On a slightly large scale than the Karajá language, I am tempted to start a (Scottish) Gaelic translation as about 65000 speak it, but I don't think I speak and write it well enough yet so it will probably have to wait a year or so.
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
I don't really know what to think about such languages, I doubt those languages are nowadays someone's primary language. In case they are, they are primary ex aequo with other popular languages like English or Spanish. If this IS the case, I don't really think the effort to maintain those languages is worth it given the people it's done for can naturally speak other languages.
Is it worth or not, it's more or less possible on Wikidot now, so why not try and see what happens :-).
I think I can reveal, we're going to make also dialects possible on Wikidot. For example: language pt_BR, which would be a dialect of language pt in a way that in place of non-translated messages pt translations would be used (then original English ones). This should solve the issue with languages without a proper ISO code, like pirrrrrate or 1337 dialects of English.
Piotr Gabryjeluk
visit my blog
:) indeed. With all the different dialects, regional accents and irregularities it always amazes me how well the rest of the world is able is able to speak, read and write English.
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
I meant LEET, but it makes sense too :-)
Piotr Gabryjeluk
visit my blog
Go ahead, Rob.
Don't wait! And make your users involved.
And one of these is the FranGlais…
Cool, Rob! I hope you do go ahead with this idea. @Gabrys, I would say that the beauty of the "Wikidot-way" is that one doesn't have to depend on considerations of pragmatic or corporate convenience ("just" community involvement). Such considerations seldom play a role in initiatives of language preservation or promotion. That's why, I guess, there's a Galician version of Wikipedia, even though there are much larger ones in Portuguese and Spanish; it's a matter of (re-)claiming ethnic identities, and Wikidot's initiative maybe just the right thing to help those communities to find a place in the internet. [Karajá, by the way, is a primary language for the majority of its speakers, and the first language being learned by the Karajá children, in most cases.]
Eduardo R. Ribeiro
http://www.etnolinguistica.org
gerdami:
1337 = LEET = Writing English using numbers instead of letters.
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
What does the 1/1651 mean? And where is a list of phrases to be translated?
Consult those pages:
Piotr Gabryjeluk
visit my blog
It is now about 47/1651 … means 47 phrases of 1651 are translated..
http://translate.wikidot.com/lang:ja
I a letter is not yet started - than create the (database-)page "{letter}:ja" by clicking on the (gray) letter and
create the page by saving it.
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
There are open phrases to trasnlate now (a lot) in the "my_account" and "Site manager" part. which I beleive are more hardcoded and need more time to split out in external storages… ( but please - append them at the end of the existing phrase-pages - otherwise all following non-english-sentences are cleared out again and we have to translate them again…( ok, the history helps here).
My question to the doumentation is the next step forward to ask the community worldwide.
Why not use the http://doc.wikidot.com/ site - but like wikipedia in different languages ( parallel-pages ( named equal in english like in the handbook ) in different sites "doc-en", "doc-fr", "doc-de" a.s.o
Example:
http://doc-en.wikidot.com/syntax:definition-list (should be "doc-en" not "doc" !)
and parallel
http://doc-de.wikidot.com/syntax:definition-list holds the same information like doc-en, but in german
Edit: I have created the 2 examples on the 2 sites without changing the start page - only for demonstration .
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
The problem with documentation is that it changes quite frequently and once it changes, there's no easy way of marking the translated pages as "to be reviewed again". Maybe API could help with this somehow. (Or if having the documentation in all languages on one site, some smart ListPages could show if the English version was edited before or after the current page…)
Piotr Gabryjeluk
visit my blog
Therefore I created in the community the page http://community.wikidot.com/syntax-changes - a try to summarize "important" changes for teh readers.
You are right- an update - list of the doc: category woud be neccessary …or
=> esiest way is to WATCH the category "doc" on Wikidot.com :)
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?