Translation Efforts

More info here for anybody interested.

I made Cross Language Namespace Map because all the namespaces were getting kind of hard to keep track of.

I've been thinking about translating pages on This Very Wiki into Welsh. Despite this, the word "trope" has no Welsh translation.

- Wow. Welsh is sorta isolated, and Trope is derived from Greek...

https://www.etymonline.com/word/trope

The history of the word sorta means you'd have to go with whatever Welsh does with loanwords or substitute it with a phrase, like Literary Pattern.

- I've decided that "trop" (plural: tropiau) is the Welsh name for "trope" since the pounoniation is more similar to the English pounoniation than what "trope" is (sounds kinda like trope-e). I've also thought of some of the names of the Trope Tropes (in Welsh: Tropiau Trop):

• Exaggerated Trope - Trop Gorliwiedig
• Downplayed Trope - Trop Israddio (Israddio is Welsh for "Downgraded")
• Justified Trope - Trop Gyfiawnhau

It.Elenco Provvisorio Delle Opere Degli Autori E Di Tutto Quanto has It.Babylon 5 as the translation of Series.Babylon Five... I guess because the English should be moved to the numeric?

Posting to test out the herald message.

Edited by MacronNotes on Aug 19th 2022 at 4:14:49 AM

Is it just me or this topic has been a bit abandoned? Welp, time to bring it back up again a bit.

Last I posted was in 2018. I think that was when I got banned due to a forum incident and even as I got released, I was rendered unable to post in certain forums again. I'll be honest that I felt... dead a bit. I ended up abandoning my Indonesian translation efforts.

But in the following years, in my place, more Indonesian pages were made. And I kinda grew up and moved on from the pain from that ban, starting to understand the efforts of the mods in trying to keep peace and just generally getting myself to calm down more and not as easily riled up emotionally. I feel like I want to continue this effort again...

At least once my current editing suspension over English grammar is sorted out. Even if I may even face permanent suspension on my own accord in the future, I'll just say it: I want to resume my Indonesian translation project.

Edited by ChrisX on Nov 9th 2023 at 2:00:17 AM

As of December, 2023, the TV Tropes database is now in UTF-8! This means it should be much easier to write pages with non-Latin characters.

Does that mean, a say Greek or Japanese translation would be viable

Possibly.

And on that note, I just discovered there are two articles from February partially translated to Chinese:

• ChsFilm.The Wandering Earth
• ChsUsefulNotes.Chinese Language

1. I can't find Chs as a language code anywhere
2. The page names and namespaces are untranslated

The first could be solved just by moving the two pages to the ISO-639-1 code, zh.

The second requires us to determine how page names should be translated.

How do we translate page names and namespaces into languages without Latin text?

Let's try translating Plot, Comedy, and Ninja into Japanese. The words are プロット, 喜劇, 忍者 respectively in Japanese, with the first being a loanword.

We can't turn Ja.Plot into プロット or Ja.Ninja into 忍者 (or any kana counterpart) with Custom Wiki Word, because names under the same namespace share the same custom Wiki Word. We also can't use page titles without Latin characters. Unless we want to wait for the technicals to improve, this gives us three options:

1. Romanize the name, and translate the custom Wiki Word.
2. Use the native word, if possible.
3. Always use Latin name.

Each has advantages and disadvantages. 1 translates the most without breaking policy, 2 balances translation with wiki navigation, and 3 is the most consistent and navigable cross-language.

1 or 2 is used by the Russian Home Page, as it uses Romanization with a Russian custom title.

3 is currently used by the two existing Chinese pages, and the Greek Home Page and Hebrew Home Page.

...then I noticed the Russian tropes do something different, which I'll call 3B. It adds the language code to the end, but uses the English title. I also added variants of 1 and 2 that rely on these language suffixes for custom titles, if needed.

Here are examples of how those three tropes would be translated. Custom Wiki Word is in bold.

If we used any of the B suggestions, we would have to alter the custom title policy (listed on How to Make a Custom Title) to allow for suffixes per language. I think a case could be made that this is similar to the retronym clause, which allows work disambiguators to be hidden.

I prefer 2B personally.

3B is used by Russian tropes, but I think this violates the current wording of the policy, which restricts using it to make the title "something completely different".

In addition, we have the option to either Romanize namespaces, or leave them untranslated (with the language code prefix added either way). Our only precedent is ChsFilm and ChsUsefulNotes, but if they're not valid namespaces then they'll need to be moved anyway.

I'm not a fluent speaker of these languages. What do you think?

Hello. I'm also involved in one of the translation initiatives and thought my perspectives could be useful even though I'm not fluent in Chinese.

I didn't understand well what you meant here, but as far as I know each page can have one custom title. So you can have プロット and 忍者 without any problems. Unless I'm missing something? But I haven't had problems with setting various custom titles for different pages under the same namespace.

• Edit: I got it while editing today — actually it is "the same page name shares the custom word across namespaces", and that means, for example, that you cannot use a custom name for Ja.Plot because it would also change Main.Plot. In this example I would use Ja.Plot as a redirect for Ja.Purotto (and only the destination page would have the custom title). [end of edit]

Personally I would suggest a mix of options 1 and 2, with preference for option 1.

I believe the pages should be easily browseable by a native speaker without English knowledge and I think the option 1 works best with this objective. As for usage of option 2, it depends on how the language likes to deal with foreign words. If a "close enough" word doesn't exist, I prefer to use transliteration unless the word is widely known by the general public (i.e. outside of tvtropes). So Ja.Purotto would be, for me, prefferable to Ja.Plot, unless the usage of "plot" is so well-established with the language speakers that anyone would know what it means. For extra points, you could make the Ja.Plot a redirection page to Ja.Purotto and it would bring in people from the English page.

For namespaces, I would go with the 2-letter language prefix plus the romanized name — unless, again, if the English name is so well-established it can be easily recognizable. An example from Portuguese: VideoGame (the English namespace) would be, literally, vídeo jogo, but the concept of videogame is so widely know nowadays that we opted to use BrVideoGame instead (note the 2-letter country prefix). Each case should be considered and it wouldn't do good to not have a few exceptions here and there.

Hope that helps

Edited by Alphinaldo on Apr 17th 2024 at 6:58:29 AM