Feed The Beast Wiki:Translation guide

As it happens, there isn't much of a guide, or rules at all, for translators. This page is suppose to help that.

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

Here is a sort of list:
 * Template:Cg/Crafting Table
 * Template:Cg/Furnace
 * Module:Infobox/strings
 * Module:Infobox/thing
 * Template:Infobox
 * Template:Infobox mod

FTB Wiki is also recommended, but it may be a lot of work for anyone new.

Translating pages
Done with the core pages! Great! Now on to more interesting pages, like Chute.

If you've noticed, 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 User:Xbony2 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 should go to the Feed The Beast Wiki:Translation portal. You can find a list of languages there. These are NOT all of the languages that the wiki can be translated to (not even by a long shot). If you want to translate to another language, then ask User:Xbony2 or the FTB Wiki IRC.

If you click one of the languages, for example, German, you'll find a rather large list of translatable articles, templates, modules, etc. It's possible that some articles are already translated, it's also possible that most are already translated, but it is very, very unlikely that all of the articles are translated. Some of the things that are translatable are in groups, like IC2 Nuclear Control or the Help Pages. Clicking "expand" will open up all of the things in it.

In our translation system, things are separated into "Units" or "Chunks". This means you will translate parts of an article, 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 articles only have 2-15 Units you need to translate, but stuff like Getting Started guides and changelogs can have hundreds.

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

Links
Links in translatable articles look (or at least, should look) like this: " ".

To translate the link, only translate the second parameter. For example, " " would become "  " if translated to Spanish. Translating it to " " WILL break the link, so don't do that.

Interwiki links
You may notice links to Wikipedia 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, items and 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 an unofficial translation. If using an unofficial/self-created translation, an English translation of the block/item/mod should be provided (example below, in Spanish).

El Gato (Ingles: Cat) es...

Restoring translations
In some (or rather, may) articles you may notice this in the translation interface:

As the quote says, the FTB Wiki used a different kind of translation system in the past. The previous system had some issues, one being that translators didn't get any credit, and everything was done externally. Nevertheless, we moved to a new system: the present system.

Many translations were made with the older system. When we moved to the new system, those older translation did not line up the with new system. Most of them need to be restored.

Xbony2 has made backups of older translated pages. Compared to the current versions of the pages, old translations likely lack information and other features. You can use it for reference, though, but be very careful before copy-pasting anything to check through it.