Valve Developer Community:Alternative Languages

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This page is a reference on having alternative languages here on the Valve Developer Community. Translating the page you want should be simple if you are fluent in a language. This article does not go into depth in translation of articles.

Titles

It is important that all page names contain only ASCII characters, otherwise the pages aren't handled correctly by the database. The name of a translated page should put the English name first, followed by a colon (:), followed by the language's ISO_639-2 abbreviation. An example of a proper page name is Help:Contents:ru. It is not a problem to use non-English text in the pages themselves, but the name of the page cannot contain any non-English, non ASCII characters.

English pages are usually the originals and there is no :en tag on them.

There are a number of ways to change how a page title will appear to readers without affecting the URL.

• Template:Lang
• Template:Otherlang2
• The series of templates such as Template:base point, which are used on entity articles.
• {{DISPLAYTITLE:title}} - this is not a template, rather a magic word to change the page title to whatever you want. All the templates listed use this internally.

Linking to pages in another language

Template:Lang will automatically detect when a page is available in other languages, and creates a row of flags linking to the page in each language. It assumes that the page names follow the naming scheme described above. See the template's page for full details.

Template:Otherlang2 is an older version of the Lang template. Lang was only recently created, so most pages are still using Otherlang2. Otherlang2 does not have automated language detection. Instead, it requires that a list of pages in each language be kept synchronized between each translation of the page. The only reason for pages to continue using Otherlang2 is if a translated page's title does not follow the standard naming scheme (in which case, the page should be moved to the correct title for reasons stated above).

Templates

Templates containing text visible on content pages should have that text translated into the translated page's language before the page is considered finished. Any documentation on the template should also be translated.

Templates without visible text may also have their documentation translated. If the template itself is identical to the English one however, the "translated" template should not be used on pages, because then if one version of the template is changed, it creates a needless hassle to change other versions as well, even though the templates are identical.

Categories

Categories also need to be separated by language, because adding a translated page to a category in another language only makes the category become cluttered.

Language checklist

Every language on the wiki should have:

• A language category.
• Translations for all the pages in the left sidebar:
  • Main Page
  • SDK Docs
  • Help:Contents
  • Category:Source SDK FAQ
  • Category:Level Design FAQ
• An icon of a flag representative of the language.
• Proper addition to Template:Lang/Template:Otherlang2.

Todo: More?

Final notes

This guide is not definitive, but it makes things much simpler when everyone follows one method of translating content, so everything in the wiki stays consistent throughout languages.

Please fully translate pages. A page partially in another language is simply not helpful for readers who only know one language.

If a page has received an important update, translations of the page should be marked with Template:Updatetranslation.

See Also

• Help:Editing
• Template:Translate