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This wiki has expanded far beyond its original scope, and in late 2008, the notion of translating it into languages other than English was raised. The large number of multilingual tropers means this dream is a distinct possibility, and by translating the wiki, we can gain perspectives form other cultures, and even a source of new tropes. This page will coordinate the various translation efforts.
How do I start a new language fork?First of all, decide what word to use for trope. In some languages, the word most similar to trope has certain other connotations that one would prefer to avoid. It is for this reason that the French version uses the word schéma; the Finnish version, on the other hand, seems to be using tropet(plural) as a neologism. It would be a good idea to make a translation thread in the forum to coordinate your specific fork. Next, make a post in the "Translation Efforts " thread on the forum to ask Fast Eddie to make up a flag icon for you. If he says yes (and he probably will, since he's quite a guy), you're set to go.
Begin by making a new namespace consisting of the standard two-letter code for your language. For example, if you wanted to make Dutch version, start by making a Nl/ namespace. This is as simple as editing Home Pages and adding a link to the home page in your own language there; thus, somebody starting a Dutch version would enter [[Nl/HomePage Nederlands]] on that page. This will show up as a red link; click on it to begin translation.
Your first port of call will be to translate the English Home Page into your language. You may wish to edit it slightly.
Next, make a page in your namespace for the Tropes of Legend; naturally, this page should have an equivalent title in your language. The German version, for example, is called Tropen Der Legende.
Copy the list of tropes onto the new page. Come up with names in your language for as many as you can; if you can't think of a good name, just list it as ???? and hope that someone else will come up with a name. Include the English title next to the translated title in [square brackets] to keep track of everything. Be sure to put your namespace code (Nl/ or whatever) in front of each trope title in your language.
How should I go about translating a trope?When you wish to translate a trope, open the English version in a new tab, then open up a primitive word processing programme such as NotePad. Type up your new entry in this, using the English writeup as a guide. Note that it is not advisable to translate the English text directly - what you want is to get the information across. Thus, if you feel it could be better written in different words, do so. Don't worry too much about examples; either don't translate them, or only translate a few. The best examples to translate are those that would be most familiar to speakers of your language, followed by those that illustrate a trope particularly well. Don't worry about the others; more examples will accumulate as the wiki grows. Don't bother trying to translate puns; just come up with a title that makes sense in your language. By the same token, feel free to give your translations punny titles, provided they aren't too obscure. Also, if the English version of a trope is named after something, your version doesn't have to be named after it; it could be named after something else, or have a generic name. For example, the German version of The Scrappy is named Der Jar Jar, after Jar-Jar Binks of Star Wars fame. At the very bottom of every page, enter the following code: [[source:En:NameOfTrope]], where NameOfTrope is the title of the trope in English. This will automatically link the trope to all other versions of it, as well as linking all other versions to yours. When you have the tropes of legend translated...I'm not sure what to do then, because nobody's gotten that far yet.What languages can I translate it into?This wiki was designed for the English language, which completely lacks diacritical marks. This means that letters with such marks are treated as punctuation, which means that non-English versions are going to have a lot more punctuated titles. To make a link to a punctuated title, see: Making A Reference: Punctuated. Typing diacritical marks can cause problems if the text is affected by any other markup. If it's affected by other markup, the characters can be entered via Alt codes* (in Windows); note that leading zeroes in Alt codes are mandatory. If it isn't bold, italicised, or linkified, the following codes using ampersands (called "HTML Entities", should you need to look up one not listed here) should work, where the ampersand (&) marks the beginning of the "entity", the hash sign (#) is the letter you wish to type, the sequence between the hash (#) and the semicolon (;) denotes the kind of accent you wish to type, and the semicolon (;) marks the end of the entity:
, and you can probably also find them in MSWord Help under 'Type International characters'. Finally, be sure you have an up-to-date web browser; all this hard accent-typing work might turn into gobbledygook if your browser doesn't interpret things correctly.
At present, the wiki cannot be translated into languages that are not written with the Latin alphabet for technical reasons (specifically, the titles are limited in what characters you can use; these characters common throughout Western Europe, including numerals and punctuation, are permissible, but outside those, the characters will turn into HTML entities,* rendering the title unreadable to humans); using other alphabets and logograms within articles will work just fine, although editing this text afterwards or reading it while editing can get clunky (because, once again, they will be converted into HTML entities).
I can has links to specific translation efforts plz?If you want to help out with one of the current forks, just go to the relevant home page and start editing. You may wish to add your name here, too. Dragon Quest Z (aka Lord TNK) and Zetaseal have expressed interest in creating a Japanese version, but that is not feasible until we can convert the storage encoding to something other than Latin-8.
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