Help:Contributing/languages/translator

This page is for producing and maintaining the static translations of wiki pages into the official languages — en, fr, eo. The hub page explains the model: pages are plain wikitext, translations are separate /lang copies. There is no marking workflow anymore.

Creating a translation

1. Copy the current English source of a settled page — plain wikitext, no translation markup.
2. Translate it, keeping links, entity IDs, URLs and code blocks verbatim; keep the heading and table structure.
3. Save it to Page/<lang> — for example Help:Contributing/code/fr — opening with the banner {{Translation|lang=fr|based-on=<revid>|date=YYYY-MM-DD}}, where based-on is the English revision you translated.
4. Add the copy to the English page's

   Languages: English · français · Esperanto

   bar; remove it again if the copy is deleted.

Copies are created only once a page has settled editorially — do not translate a page that is still being restructured.

Keeping copies in sync

• When the English page is edited, regenerate its copies in the same session and update based-on.
• If an English page changed outside a session, flag the stale copies rather than silently leaving them.
• Machine translation is a starting point, not a final answer: always read and correct machine-translated text.
• Keep terminology consistent with the entity terms in the data layer — see the entity terms section on the hub page.
• Browser machine translation complements, never replaces, the static copies: fr is covered everywhere, eo only in Chrome.
• Check the rendered result after saving — the copy should mirror the original's structure.

What to keep verbatim

• Wikilinks, entity IDs (P1, Q6), URLs, and <syntaxhighlight>/<pre>/<code> blocks.
• Template calls and their parameters, except visible prose.
• Proper nouns and canonical terms — do not translate them.

See also

• Help:Contributing/languages — the hub
• Help:Contributing — contributing to this wiki