Valve Developer Community talk:Alternative Languages
Contents
Languages Category
How to add the template to a category
{{otherlang:en}}, {{otherlang:en:de|category:categoryname:de}}?
Add redirects with translated names to translated templates
Template:Confirm:zh-cn, it would likely be annoying to use it, as they would need to either copy paste English text or use an English keyboard to type in {{confirm:zh-cn}}, which not all Chinese people want to do. If there was a template redirect page named simply Template:确认 that redirected to Template:Confirm:zh-cn, then Chinese people would only have to type in {{确认}} to use the Chinese confirm template.
In my opinion this would make it easier for chinese people to insert chinese templates. Right?
{{Warning}} template Предупреждение redirect; an Esperanto redirect Noto to the English template {{Note}}.
Well, this makes some sense. However, this also has its downsides.
+ This option will make it easier for editors who do not know English very well.
− Editing the language subpages of a language you don’t know will become very difficult. For example, you just wanted to fix something in all the Note templates on the Turkish subpage, but how will you understand where this template is if everything is in Turkish?
− Moderation of such things will become much more difficult. In fact, anyone can come and create a redirect to a template with a bad (or obscene) name in an unknown language.
− Translation problem: not everything is so good and can be easily translated. For example, Todo can be translated into Russian as Необходимо сделать, and this is quite long. And some things are very difficult to translate, because in English, for example, there is a word art. In Russian this word has many spellings, but none of them reflects the same essence as the original word art.
I can also say that redirects make pages load a little longer due to the extra inclusion, but this is very slightly longer, so I do not consider this a minus. Also, such redirects will clog the list of used templates (you can see it when previewing while editing the page), but this is not so scary, so this is also not a minus.
I’m not saying that it’s not worth experimenting in this area, it’s just that this wiki is not very flexible and we don’t have enough tools to work with such things fully.
The same is quite applicable for English; how many foreigners for example wanted to make a change to our templates, but couldn’t because the page was in English?
Arguably, the same thing can be done in English; for example on a Chinese wiki, some English person could write an obscene article in English and no one would know what it is if no one knows English there. Basically, moderation is going to be required regardless of the language.
Todo can be translated into Russian as Необходимо сделать, and this is quite long. And some things are very difficult to translate, because in English, for example, there is a word art. In Russian this word has many spellings, but none of them reflects the same essence as the original word art.Yes, this is unfortunately the nature of translation; and it’s why I thought of the redirect, more as a fix rather than a full solution.
Well, what version of MediaWiki is it based on?
I agree, but I think this can be partially solved by creating good documentation in which all the names in the translated version will be spelled out, and how they are written in English, as well as links to these templates.
The version (and other data) can be viewed on the Special:Version page. However, even despite the not-so-old version of the engine, many things either do not work or are limited/prohibited in use.
So what plugins don't work? Why are some prohibited?
Also, StringFunctions (from Extension:ParserFunctions) are most likely disabled on this wiki, because their description says this:
len, pos, rpos, sub, replace, explode) are integrated from the StringFunctions extension, but are only available if an administrator sets $wgPFEnableStringFunctions = true; in LocalSettings.php.
If these functions were not disabled, there would be a lot more possibilities (well, at least it seems so to me).
If we talk about the title of this whole conversation, then no one stops you. If you want, you can add redirects with translated names to translated templates. We all experiment here often and for good reason. For example, we managed to make a lot of good templates (for example, {{User page}} or {{Software page}}).
Language Subpages
[[SteamVR/Environments]] should be [[SteamVR/Environments:ru]], but that feels off. It isn’t a subpage of [[SteamVR]], it’s a subpage of [[SteamVr:ru]]. This gets even worse for the sub-subpages, like [[SteamVR/Environments/Getting Started]]. What should be done in these cases?
