Join the Fediverse:Translation guide

Rules for translators

While translating the wiki please follow these few rules:

Gender-inclusive language

Use gender-inclusive (not gender-neutral language) as much as possible and if applicable. English is mostly a gender neutral language. As long as we use "they" instead of "he", when we talk about a generic person, it's all good. E.g. "The average Fediverse user is a nice person, they like to greet new users." Other languages however (e.g. German, Spanish and Portuguese) are not gender neutral. In German for example there is a "generic masculine", which means that you generally talk about male persons if you're not talking about specific persons. So e.g. "The handyman" usually translates to "Der Handwerker" which means "The male handyman". We instead use "Die*der Handwerker*in" which specifically includes female and non-binary (represented by the *) handymen.

While translating this very page please give more examples for your language here.

Don't add information to translations

With exceptions like the one just mentioned above, a translation should be just that - a translation. Of course some adaptation like localization is sometimes necessary, but translations shouldn't add additional content that doesn't exist in the English original text. If you think some information is missing please first add it to the English text and then translate it.

How to translate

There is a lot of documentation on how to translate with the translate extension that we use here on the MediaWiki.

If you have any questions you can ask User:Paula. She will then find an answer and probably write something about that here.

How to edit the original/English/Source page

When a page is in translation you'll find tags like this <!--T:1--> in the source text. It's best to leave those alone. If you want to move a section of the content, move these tags along with it so the translations don't go missing.
❗️Never create one of these tags on your own❗️ they will be created automatically when User:Paula marks the edited page for translation.

How to make a page translatable

To prepare a page for translation you need to put <languages/> on the very top of the page and put at least one set of translation tags (<translate></translate>) in the text.
Always make sure there are as many <translate> tags as </translate> tags. Text within these tags can be translated, everything else will just be carried over to the translated page without being translated.
So ideally you'll only put actual text between the tags and other code, like {| which creates a table outside.
If you're using a template, Ideally you only put parameter-text in the tags, so e.g.: {{Infobox instance |position=float:right |name=ClimateJustice.social |file=Climate Justice server thumbnail.png
|about=<translate>Welcome to this official Fediverse instance<br> for climate justice activists.</translate>
|inception=2020-07-18 |founder=[[Fedizen:PaulaToThePeople|PaulaToThePeople]]
|green?={{yes|<translate>Yes, climate neutral</translate>}} |population=2.9k |platform=Mastodon}}