• View
• Edit
• History
• Print

Localization

This group is intended as a resource for translators to help them prepare a local version of PmWiki's documentation pages and for configuring a localized group on pmwiki.org using PmWikiXx/XLPage.

First time translation

There is no translation for your language and you want to create one.

Before all, subscribe to the english mailing list pm (Patrick Michaud, the owner of PmWiki) will acknowledge your wish and give you basic informations. You can also ask for a localized mailing list if your are several volunteers.

Basically there are two steps involved in creating a local translation on pmwiki.org:

1. create an XLPage in the appropriate PmWikiXx group (where "Xx" is the appropriate two-letter language code),
2. create the "home page" for the group as PmWikiXx/PmWikiXx .

pmwiki.org tries to help out a bit by providing page templates for each of the above pages(PmWiki.XLPageTemplate and PmWiki.PmWiki). For example, if someone wanted to create a Maori translation (language code "mi"), they would fill in the pages at

• PmWikiMi/XLPage?action=edit
• PmWikiMi/PmWikiMi?action=edit

That's all that really *needs* to be done to provide a localization.

Completing a translation

However, if you want to go further, and provide translations of documentation or other files, then it's simply a matter of creating pages within the new group. As far as what pages should be translated, and how they should be translated -- I tend to leave those decisions up to whoever is doing the work of translating. :-) Pm

XLPage

Once i18n-Xx.zip file is installed, the PmWikiXx.XLPage is available from the wiki itself and can be used to translate or change the translated words without further server change. Any fix in this page is immediately visible on the wiki. Of course, Xx stands for your Langage code.

Resources

• PmWiki.XLPageTemplate Contains a list of strings to be translated which PmWiki uses.
• PmWiki.XLPageCookbookTemplate Contains a list of strings to be translated for cookbook addons.
• SampleConfigFileLocalization Contains additional localizations which need to be implemented through insertion in the local/config.php file.
• StateOfTranslationTemplate is the list of the English documentation pages, to help in the creation of local translation pages
• TerminologyTemplate
• ISO 639: Standard two-letter language codes from W3C

And the page which is distributed with the download, to explain PmWiki installers how to install the local version :

• PmWiki.Internationalizations

Should the page titles be translated ?

Depending choice of translators, documentation page name have been or not tranlated, e.g.:

• German translation mainly use the english page names
• French translation have originally translated page names in french, which need a careful follow-up of already translated page and page interlinks. Page titles have been later set back to english.

In any case, the title appearing to the user can be set by the directive (:title title of the page:), hiding the real page name (which is still visible in the address name).

A tool proposed since version 2.1 shall help with page interlinks, this is the possibility to display the title of the page instead of the link name:

• [[PageName|+]] shall display the real page title and not 'PageName'. This mean than anywhere you use the link to the english name, the title of the page is displayed instead of the page name. With that, if page names are not translated, the links no longer needs to be translated, it is only needed to give local titles to local pages. When writing or translating a page, simply add the |+ and the tranlation is done.

Also page lists in a given language can use the format 'title' which display a list with page titles (in local language) instead of page names. You can list all page of a given translation with the following call:

• [[PmWikiXx?action=search&q=PmWikiXx/&fmt=title]]

Starting with PmWiki version 2.2.14 (PITS:01157) the title of several technical pages is automatically translated, if the corresponding string is provided in the XLPage, without the need to add a (:title <PageTitle>:) directive in that page. Also the [[PageName|+]] markup supports this feature, to translate automatically the link text. This is especially interesting for those pages that initially do not exist, like RecentChanges. A separate section "PageTitle/LinkText technical pages" with some entries is added to the PmWiki.XLPageTemplate for this feature.
But note the priority order to take the PageTitle/LinkText:

1. if available, taken from the (:title:) directive
2. if available, taken from the XLPage entry
3. otherwise just take the PageName

More specific we are currently talking about following page names, including most default pages in the Site and SiteAdmin groups:

 (All)?(Site|Group)(Header|Footer|Attributes)
 (All)?Recent(Changes|Uploads)
 (Auth|Edit)Form
 (Block|Auth)List
 (Side|Left|Right)Bar
 (Wiki)?Sandbox
 \\w+QuickReference
 \\w+Templates
 ApprovedUrls
 AuthUser
 InterMap
 NotifyList
 PageActions
 Site(Admin)?

where "(...)?" means an optional part, "(a|b)" means "a or b", and "\\w+" means a number of letters.

So, considering that help a lot page translators and translation update, it can be recommended to stuck to english page name, and use above tools to hide this to users.

If adopted, you can then set in the page GroupFooter the following (which is not quite ok in this group but should work in your local language group):

%define=trad block color='#060' bgcolor=#cf9 border='1px solid #060'
padding='3px' font-size='smaller'%

----
%trad% (:if exists PmWiki.{$Name}:)
Traduction of [[(http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/)PmWiki.{$Name}]] -(:elseif
exists Site.{$Name}:)
Traduction of [[(http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/)Site.{$Name}]] - (:ifend:)
Original page on [[(http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/){$FullName}]] -
[[$[Backlinks]->A?action=search&q=link={$FullName}&fmt=title]]\\
(:if (equal "{$ScriptUrl}" "http://pmwiki.org/wiki") or (equal
"{$ScriptUrl}" "http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki"):)
Last modifications:\\
[[{$FullName}]]: {$LastModified}\\
(:if exists PmWiki.{$Name}:)
[[PmWiki.{$Name}]]: {PmWiki.{$Name}$LastModified}
(:ifend:)

If english names are maintained for the translated pages, you can then make a comparative list by creating a page 'ListLocal' and writing in it the following (replace PmWikiXx by your local group). Note that the pagelist directive shall be one a unique line, it have been cut here for presentation reasons only:

 
(:pagelist fmt=PmWikiXx.ListLocal#translation group=PmWiki
 order=-time -RecentChanges -DocumentationGuidelines-Comments:)

[[#translation]]
(:if equal {<$Group}:)
(:table border='1' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='0':)
(:cellnr align=center colspan=2:)'''Original page `PmWiki'''
(:cell align=center colspan=2:)'''Translation `PmWikiXx'''
(:cellnr align=center:)Page name
(:cell align=center:)Last modified
(:cell align=center:)Last modified
(:cell align=center:)Page name
(:if:)
(:cellnr:)[[{=$FullName}|+]]
(:cell:){=$LastModified}
(:cell:){PmWikiXx.{=$Name}$LastModified}
(:cell:)[[PmWikiXx/{=$Name}|+]]
(:if equal {>$Group}:)
(:tableend:)
(:if:)
[[#translationend]]

As an exemple of the result PmWikiFr.ListLocal
- from Antony Templier suggestion -

Existing translations

Note: the page listing does not work for those language groups which use UTF-8 character encoding and use those characters in the pagenames.