Translation Efforts

Here's where we have a place to co-ordinate the various translation efforts. Feel free to use the target language in these conversations.

This forum is ON TOPIC, please.

edited Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:18:31 by FastEddie

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

By the way, some enterprising troper might use this thread to define a procedure and explain the markup requirements and all that jazz.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

Gallíet čaní frú saônal ĥezu þalur, ber šô.

This post was last updated on 25/2/2009 at 20:57 GMT.

OK, here's how to go about doing a translation effort.

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 as a neologism.

Next, post either here or in the "IS TVTropes available in other languages?" thread 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.

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.

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.

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 your one.

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 isn't bold, italicised, or linkified, the following codes should work, where # is the letter you wish to type:

• Acute accent: &#acute; (or ctrl+alt+# in Windows). For example, á is typed by inputting á
• Grave accent: &#grave;. For example, È is type by inputting È
• Circumflex: &#circ;. Ior example, î is typed by inputting î
• Tilde: &#tilde;. For example, ñ is typed by inputting ñ
• Umlaut: &#uml;. For example, Ü is type by inputting Ü
• ç: Use ç
• Caron: &#caron;. For example, Š is typed by inputting Š

If you wish to use these symbols in a link, or in italics or bold, you'll have to input them directly. You can copy and paste most of them from this page, and you can probably also find them in MSWord Help under 'Type International characters'.

It is unclear at present how the wiki can handle titles and articles in Greek or Hebrew, that use the Cyrillic or Arabic alphabets, or use logograms (such as Korean and Japanese).

When you have the tropes of legend translated...I'm not sure what to do then, because nobody's gotten that far yet.

To wrap up this post, here are some links to threads for specific translations and the tropers involved (if you want your name added or removed from this list, post in this thread or PM me):

• Suomi
  • Etusivu (YKTTW)
    • Jethro Q Walrustitty
    • Nits
• Deutsch
  • Home Page
    • (Fawriel)
    • Fast Eddie
    • Frank75
    • Gemmifer
    • nephthys
    • Jandalf
• Français
  • Home Page
    • Jhiday
    • Alda
    • Micah
    • Vampire Buddha
• Español
  • Home Page
    • Da Nuke
    • Romanticide
    • The Adversary
    • Maxmordon
• Esperanto

  • Kilyle

• Norwegian
  • Home Page
    • Tulling
• Swedish
  • Startsida
    • Fan
    • henke37

Dragon Quest Z (AKA Lord TNK) and Zetaseal have expressed interest in creating a Japanese version, but I'm not sure how feasible that is at this time.

edited 11th Nov '10 3:06:30 PM by VampireBuddha

Ukrainian Red Cross

I just did an informal check on the sandbox and the wiki can handle article text in Japanese just fine; I'm not sure about titles, though (they'd have to be ptitle'd at the least).

online since 1993 | huge retrocomputing and TV nerd | lee4hmz.info (under construction) | heapershangout.com

Not so much in this browser, which is set to Western encoding. This is an issue. We store data in Latin-8, so UTF will be mangled, encoding-wise.

Best to hold off on the non Latin-8 lingos until we have a look at the implications of changing the storage encoding. Janitor would like to have Korean at some point, so that effort is underway.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

Count me in for helping with the tropes en español. I was going to ask these very same questions but once more, TV tropes amazed me.

I'm not sure if my name should be on the list. I participated in some brainstorming within the thread, but I never actually do any editing...

Now... exactly how do I make pages with diaretical marks (and points as we're on this) on their titles?

Fawriel: Really? I looked at the German translation thread, but since I don't speak the language, I had no idea what anyone was talking about. I can remove you if you like.

Maxmordon: Dammit, I'd tell you how, but tildes don't work right on the forum. Maybe I should just make a wiki page for it.

edited Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:54:33 by VampireBuddha

Ukrainian Red Cross

Well, I don't really care. As I said, I don't know if I qualify - I did contribute some, and I'll gladly contribute more ideas and such if I'm asked to, but I'm not active per se, so listing me might be misleading. *shrugs*

I edited in a link to the markup how-to's in the procedure entry.

I think you are right Vampire Buddha, that the procedure should be moved to a standard wiki page so it can be linked to more easily and edited via the standard parser.

edited Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:22:26 by FastEddie

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

I've started TV Tropes Translation Project as a convenient link. Think we should link to it on the Home Page?

Ukrainian Red Cross

Thanks. Not so much, with the Home Page link. Perhaps in Welcome To TV Tropes as a bit of a recruiting blurb.

It seems desirable to keep the effort discussion in this fairly findable forum.

edited Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:15:57 by FastEddie

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

As these translation pages pop up, I add that if you'd like to make an Italian wiki I can lend a hand. Even if very few people know it! It might even be a good way to improve my translation skills... just be aware that I'm sometimes busy with university, but still I'll help you guys the best I can!

*walks continuously onto a wall* WHO CREATED MY AI???

Go ahead. I'm sure there's someone else here who speaks Italian.

Also, working on the French version has improved my translation skills somewhat, so it should be good for you.

Ukrainian Red Cross

Fast Eddie, if you haven't already, I was wondering if you could make a flag icon for the Esperanto homepage at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Eo/HomePage.

Hello, I am also doing some translation works for the wiki in Spanish. I've made some articles over there, so yeah...

I was wondering if it was possible for the buttons of the wiki to be changed to the language of the page. It appears the Sugar Wiki has different formatting for the buttons, could something similar be done, just with the button's language? For example, on the Spanish TV Tropes, could 'edit page' be changed to 'editar'?

The Esperanto flag has been installed.

Changing the interface to match the language is something that will go on the to-do list. It will help to have an image of the Home Page done in the target language to go by.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

Dunno if this is the right place or the wishlist forum. Anyway, this whole De/ Fr/ Es/ etc. thing is just extremely tedious and counter-intuitive as it is needed for literally every single link.

Wouldn't it be possible to do something like this:

• if namespace/ part in wiki link present
  • then use given namespace for wiki link
• else if current namespace is 2 letters long
  • then use current namespace for wiki link
• else use Main namespace for wiki link

Of course this is way oversimplified and I have no Idea about eventual performance issues that might come with it but it would be a HUGE improvement.

edited 7th Jun '09 11:55:54 AM by Ana

Please, the current system is actually SIMPLER than the one at the Other Wiki. At least here you don't need to bother links to other namespaces.

On the Other Wiki you don't have to bother with namespaces for the sole reason of translation/localization in the first place. They have subdomains for that very purpose.

And even if you had to, I don't know, behead a chicken every time you write an article over there, so what? We will not improve our conditions because somewhere else it's even worse? That argument is borderline idiotic when it comes to Real Life social issues and when the solution might be a really trivial piece of programming code, you can cut the "borderline" part.

Edit: And of course you have to bother with links to namespaces, thats the whole point I'm trying to make! If you want to set a wiki link on a French article to another French article, you HAVE to use a Fr/Article namespace link for that.

My suggestion is simply to let the software check if the page with the link on it is already in a namespace with two letters (and thus on a Non-English page) and if it is, use that namespace as a default for wikilinks without namespace syntax instead of Main. This would not change the standard behavior on any site that isn't in a Non-English namespace.

Because, what is more likely? Someone on a Non-English page linking to a another Non-English page or to an English page? Right now, the software assumes the latter.

edited 7th Jun '09 10:51:04 PM by Ana

See also TV Tropes Translation Project. I have also listed the ALT codes  ^*

for the various accented letters usually needed when translating something.

Thus speaks the Omega Metroid! ...Or something like that.

I was thinking about starting translating Tropes Of Legend from English to Italian, so Fast Eddie, could you please make a flag icon for that page?

I'm not evil. It's not like I want to conquer the world, I only want to improve it for everyone's sake.