Commons talk:Project page translation

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Deprecated language codes for translation[edit]

The complete list is at [1]. Ctrl+F: "Deprecated language codes". 

'gan-hans' => 'Translate in gan please.',
'gan-hant' => 'Translate in gan please.',

'ike-cans' => 'Translate in iu please.',
'ike-latn' => 'Translate in iu please.',

'kk-cyrl' => 'Translate in kk please.',
'kk-latn' => 'Translate in kk please.',
'kk-arab' => 'Translate in kk please.',
'kk-kz'   => 'Translate in kk please.',
'kk-tr'   => 'Translate in kk please.',
'kk-cn'   => 'Translate in kk please.',

'ku-latn' => 'Translate in ku please.',
'ku-arab' => 'Translate in ku please.',

'shi-tfng' => 'Translate in shi please.',
'shi-latn' => 'Translate in shi please.',

'sr-ec' => 'Translate in sr please.',
'sr-el' => 'Translate in sr please.',

'tg-latn' => 'Translate in tg please.',

'zh-hans' => 'Translate in zh please.',
'zh-hant' => 'Translate in zh please.',
'zh-cn' => 'Translate in zh please.',
'zh-hk' => 'Translate in zh please.',
'zh-mo' => 'Translate in zh please.',
'zh-my' => 'Translate in zh please.',
'zh-sg' => 'Translate in zh please.',
'zh-tw' => 'Translate in zh please.',

4nn1l2 (talk) 21:19, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback #2[edit]

@Aymatth2: You asked for my feedback, so here is my opinion (apart from additions and minor changes I made straight on the page):

  • I don’t like this overtemplated method for Wikipedia links. They are not standard, so break the rule of the least astonishment, which is linked from this page, by the way. Handling unknown templates is painful with the Translate extension, as there is neither preview option nor links for templates used in the translation unit, so one has to select the template, copy it, scroll up to the top of the page, paste in the search field, and open the search result in a new tab. Standard link syntax is natively supported by the translation interface (at least in page view), but anyways translators are more used to it.
  • {{Plural}} is not needed, you can use the {{PLURAL:}} parser function instead, which automatically uses the page language. Compare {{plural|lang={{PAGELANGUAGE}}|{{Years since|2018}}|year|years|years}} with {{PLURAL:{{Years since|2018}}|year|years}} in terms of complexity. It is also a standard method, known to translators coming from elsewhere (e.g. translatewiki.net).
  • * List entry one</translete>
<translete>
* Next list entry
    gives AFAIK expected result (i.e. there is a line break in the translation between the two translation units). Whitespace outside of <translate> tags is preserved, only whitespace immediately after the start tag and immediately before the end tag is dropped (the <!--T:n--> comments form part of whitespace in this sense).

—Tacsipacsi (talk) 22:54, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Tacsipacsi: Thank you very much for your thoughtful changes and feedback. I fully agree with all the improvements you made to the essay. I have tried to correct the two places where {{plural}} is mentioned to refer to the function rather than the template, and have tweaked the description of list mark-up.

The question of interwiki links is more complex. See User talk:Multichill#Commons:Project scope. The problem I am trying to address is that most translations are partial, and much of the displayed text in these partial translations is in English. Commons:Urheberrechtsregeln nach Gebiet is probably typical: some German, mostly English. Despite this, the links should go to the Wikipedia article in German if possible.

If the English code is, e.g. 

See {{wp-Case law|Case law|in English}}

That will show in a French page that has not translated the unit as 

See Case law

The reader is looking at a French page, so should be glad the link leads to the French article. although they may be slightly surprised that it does. Better, the unit would be translated, so they would see: 

Voir Jurisprudence

But if the page is in Portuguese they will see 

See Case law

And if that is translated they will see 

Ver jurisprudência

Once the "Case law" page has been translated to Portuguese, the link will automatically adjust to point to it, where the hardcoded Ver [[w:en:Case Law|jurisprudência]] would keep pointing to an English page when a Portuguese version is now available.

I cannot find a "preview" function in the translation interface. Instead, I keep several tabs open in the browser, so I can for example check the documentation for "template:wp-Case law" using copy-and-paste. I would hope that translators will get used to the syntax of the {{wp-article name}} templates, which is the same for all of them. Bottom line, for me, is that a templated approach that generally points the reader to the article/language they prefer is worth implementing even if it requires some adjustment for translators. But where are the translators? This seems a much more basic issue. Aymatth2 (talk) 01:22, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Aymatth2: I fully understand your opinion, but I don’t like it. Can we shift this “rule” from a recommendation to a fully optional method? By the way, there are translators, they simply can’t keep up with your speed. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 17:55, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Tacsipacsi: I have made that change. The difference is that I have just finished migrating a whole lot of policy/guideline pages to the translate extension and am acutely aware that a lot of them have not been significantly updated for ten years, while the English versions continue to be changed and expanded. There is a great deal of "show through" English text, which should link to the right Wikipedia if possible. But I can see that translators may be a bit puzzled by the new wp-xyz templates, at least at first. Aymatth2 (talk) 19:06, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Aymatth2: Thanks! I know you recently worked a lot with these translations (and many thanks for it!), but I hope the situation will be much better in the next decade: now that changes to the English page show up in the translations, it will be easier to notice that the translation needs to be updated. Two minor notes on your recent change:

  • I think links to redirects pointing to sections can be allowed—they are not more prone to change than “normal” articles. Although it’s technically not easy to achieve sitelinks pointing such redirects on Wikidata, they are acceptable at policy level, so the Wikidata method is affected as well.
  • You changed the en-gb language link to xyz. This doesn’t work. Module:Wikidata label discards all invalid language codes, and uses interface language instead—English in your case, so the warning appears for you, but not for me (using Hungarian interface). I carefully chose en-gb as it’s guaranteed to fall back to English as long as no British English Wikipedia exists (which is quite unlikely to happen), but the template handles them differently, so it triggers the warning. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 19:54, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Tacsipacsi: I have tweaked the description at Commons:Project page translation#Wikipedia anchors. Is there a difficulty with treating a redirect to a section as the same as a regular page? I would never have seen that lang=xyz would not work. Fixed. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:33, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Linking redirects[edit]

@Tacsipacsi: I tried to link the redirect w:en:Wrapped Reichstag to w:de:Verhüllter Reichstag and got "Error $1 Attempted modification of the item failed". Is there some trick to this? Aymatth2 (talk) 19:01, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, this is what I meant by “technically not easy”: currently the only way to store redirects in Wikidata (at least using the web interface; I don’t know its API so in-depth, but assume it’s similar) is to store a sitelink, and turn the linked page into a redirect afterwards, either by linking the page before merging it (in case you’re just merging an article into another one), or temporarily breaking the redirect in any way that the software doesn’t handle it like a redirect. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 21:29, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I did that with the English redirect and it seems to have worked. I then started a not-a-redirect at w:es:Envoltura del Reichstag, linked it to the English version, then made it a redirect. Wikidata:Q17354234 now equates two redirects and one full article. This may not be unusual: some wikis give the topic a paragraph in a parent article, and others give it a standalone article. But I hesitate to add formal instructions for fooling Wikidata here. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:06, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I don’t think it’s fooling Wikidata as it’s explicitly mentioned in a footnote on WD:N; however, I do think a such technical guide about editing Wikidata doesn’t belong here. It should be documented somewhere on Wikidata (maybe it already is; I don’t know). —Tacsipacsi (talk) 10:25, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I have added a short description at Commons:Project page translation#Wikipedia anchors for the sake of completeness. This page is meant to answer as many as possible "how do I do that?" questions related to handling different languages in project pages. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:05, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Archival[edit]

Is archival really needed? This is the fourth section on this page, there was not even a table of contents before my post. I think archival is needed when a discussion page becomes very busy, and cannot be overseen even with the TOC, after dozens of sections. This is not the case here; moreover, I don’t think there will be noticeable activity after initial development, so it doesn’t make sense as a “just in case” action, either. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 23:20, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I dropped it - just a habit. Aymatth2 (talk) 23:24, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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