Feed The Beast Wiki:Translation guide

Welcome to the Official Gamepedia FTB Wiki! A large part of our wiki is the translation interface, which allows many articles and templates to be translated to other languages. This is very favorable for players outside of English-majority nations, as looking for information can be very difficult when almost all documentation is written in English, and a translation made by a real person is always superior to automated services like Google Translate.

Before translating anything
Please consider translating the "core" templates before translating anything else. Many, maybe even most, articles depend on these.

Here is a list:
 * Cg/Crafting Table
 * Cg/Furnace
 * Infobox
 * About
 * Main
 * Credit
 * See also
 * Main
 * Credit
 * See also

FTB Wiki (the main page) is also recommended, but it may be a lot of work for anyone new.

Translating pages
Most pages aren't translatable. Each page needs special markup for it to be translatable. Do not try to translate a page that isn't translatable, and do not try to add the markup yourself; please ask on the translators' noticeboard if you want a particular article to be translatable.

Instead of clicking the "Random Page" button until you find an article that has a "Translate this page" button on the top, you can go to the Translation portal. There, you can find a list of languages. These are not all of the languages that the wiki can be translated to (not even close). If you want to translate to another language, then make sure to ask on the translators' noticeboard.

If you click one of the languages, for example, German, you'll find a rather large list of translatable articles, templates, modules, etc. Some pages may already be translated, perhaps even most, but it is quite unlikely that all of the pages are translated. Many of the pages that are translatable are in groups, like IC2 Nuclear Control or BuildCraft. Clicking "expand" will open up all of the items in that group.

In the translation extension this wiki uses, pages are separated into "Units" or "Chunks". This means you will translate one part of a page at a time, rather then an entire article. This also means if the original article is changed, you don't need to retranslate every single thing, just the specific Unit. Most pages only have 2-15 Units you need to translate, but some pages like Getting Started guides and Changelogs can have hundreds.

Make sure to translate everything in an article! If the English unit means the same thing in your language, just copy it over.

Links
Links in translatable articles should look like this:.

To translate the link, only translate the second parameter. For example, "" may become "" if translated to Spanish. Translating it to "" will break the link, so be careful not to do that.

Interwiki links
You may notice links to Wikipedia and other wikis are not formatting like a normal link. It might look like this: " United States ".

Making it link to, for this example, the corresponding Spanish Wikipedia article, is fairly easy. The English Wikipedia includes interwikis to almost all other Wikipedias. So, " United States " can be converted to " Estados Unidos ". Or, for a German example, " United States " can be converted to " Vereinigte Staaten ".

The syntax is fairly simple: in "  ", "  " represents your language code (like "nl" for Dutch or "de" for German). "  " represents the name of the page in the other Wikipedia. "  " is the display name of the link.

Names
Names of blocks and items and sometimes mods are usually translated. Translations of these names should be based off of any official translations of the mods! If no official translations exist, it is recommended to submit a translation, or use the most popular unofficial translation. If using an unofficial or self-created translation, the original English name of the block/item/mod/whatever should be provided in the article. Here is an example below, in Spanish:

El Gato (inglés: Cat) es...

Names of modders (or teams) generally shouldn't be translated. You can include a pronunciation, though, if you think it helps readers (especially if you use a language not based off a Latin script).

Keep in mind the names used in translation should firstmost be recognizable to users looking for information, and secondmost be immersive. For example, if a mod's English name is usually what it is referred to in a foreign community, it is preferred to refer to it by the English name rather than a translation, even if that is less immersive (of course, providing a translation alongside it in the main mod page is perfectly acceptable and also recommended).

List of possibly useful unofficial mod translations
Feel free to add on to this list.

Tiles
Tile names, the names that come up when hovering over grids, can be translated (like on World Anchor/zh-cn). These translations are also re-used in several navigation boxes to reduce translation of already translated terms.

A list of tiles are in the TileList special page. Clicking "Translate" allows the translation of each tile. However, Do not translate tiles manually! As of this time, there are over 200,000 tiles registered, so you could spend an endless amount of time translating! The majority of tile translations are done through bots, based on already existing translations dumps from mods. If you want a particular mod translated or updated, then make sure to ask on the translators' noticeboard.

If there are errors in the tile names, or missing translations, consider sending a patch to the mod author and then placing a request for an update on the translators' noticeboard. Note that the automatic tile translation software is not perfect, so some tiles may be missing, despite the status of official translations, and may have to be done manually.

Restoring translations
In some translatable articles you may notice this in the translation interface:

or

In the past, the FTB Wiki didn't use the translations interface it uses today. Many translations were made in the "older way". When the wiki moved to solely using the interface, those older translations did not line up with the newer system; many of them need to be restored, thus the Translation Restoration project was created.

Qualifications
This is a wiki; there are no real qualifications for translators. However, if your translations are of low quality, they may be difficult for users to understand.

Please do not translate to a language you don't know. If you use tools like Google Translate constantly, this might be an issue. It's okay to use such utilities if you forget a word or two, but having to translate things like entire sentences to your language is a bad sign.

If the language you're translating to is your native language, chances are that you are more than qualified to translate. If you can read and understand an article in your language's Wikipedia, then you are probably also qualified.

However, do not feel pressured to avoid translating if you aren't sure if your grasp of a language is strong enough. Not everything needs to be perfect in every way. Besides, it's not like translations can't be improved later.

English qualifications
Since this is an English wiki, and you can only translate from English to another language, it is expected that translators (as well as other contributors) know at least a basic understanding of English.

If an article has been translated to a language you understand better than English, it's okay to peek at that other translation if it helps you out. Just be careful not to base your new translation entirely off the other translation (we don't want a case of telephone).

Ultimately, don't worry too much if your English isn't sharp as a knife; you can ask Google, Wiktionary or a local wiki editor for guidance if something doesn't make sense to you.

FTB Wiki related

 * Our Tilesheets extension
 * Our OreDict extension
 * TheSatanicSanta's HeaderCount extension

More general

 * The MediaWiki interface.
 * The Official Minecraft Wiki.
 * The MediaWiki Wiki. Help pages should no longer be translated here, but there (all of the translations here have now been imported there).
 * The Gamepedia Help Wiki. Like the MediaWiki Wiki, but somewhat simplified.