Guidelines

Introduction

The translation area is an innovative tool for multilingual settings, which allows translators to make their translations directly to the website. The system doesn’t translate the content automatically, it’s just a tool which makes the work of translators and administrators much easier. This system allows to administrate the rights of translators, to follow the whole translation progress, to add new languages to the website and, of course, to translate and to edit the texts.

Each project has a separate translation area, the link will be visible after joining the translators community.

Translators need to register in the translation area in order to be able to translate the websites.

In case of questions or problems please contact us.

System description

The first page of the translation area contains a brief information about the project, a list of the languages and a list of last activities:

First of all, the translators need to obtain a permission from the administrators, in order to be able to translate the website into any language (click on “Ask permission”):

After the permission is given, the translators can already translate the website to the required language.

After selecting the language one can see the structure of the website and visit different areas, where texts, as displayed on the website, can be found:

Statistical information (amount of strings, words and characters) is available in almost all parts of the translation area.

After entering any part of the structure, the pages with the texts appear:

A list of the texts that can be translated appears. All texts are divided into units called “strings”. That can be either one word or expression, or even a whole paragraph.

A text on red background means that the translation is still required and to be done. Text on green background means that the string is already translated. Text on yellow background means that the translation is out-of-date and needs to be checked.

If the translation on yellow background is correct (e.g. a typo existed in the source language, but not in the translation), the status of the translation can be changed to “translated” (click the link “Change” on the right side of the string for that):

Sometimes it is very difficult to understand what exactly was changed in the text and why the status was changed to "out of date". For this reason, it is possible to see the exact changes in the source language. Click on the date of the last modification:

If there were changes in the translated text, you can also see them here. Click on the date of last modification:

Translation process

The text in the source language can be found on the left side of the page and the translation has to be entered on the right side (use “Click to edit” and “Save” in order to save the translation):

The date of the last update and the name of the translator appear next to each section and can be seen by every user of translation area.

The translation will automatically appear on the website, there is no need to update the files or inform the administrators.

Special functions of translation area

Searching and filtering

There is a possibility to search for certain words in the text modules, using the search function on top of the right side. Use the field on top, right side of the translation area („Search strings...“)

There is a filter on top as well, where the modules can be filtered according to certain parameters:

• To show all strings
• To show only untranslated strings
• To show only out-of-date strings
• To show untranslated and out-of-date strings

In this case there is no need to search the whole translation system in order to find texts, that still require translation:

Help with translation

If you need help with the translation, there are three tools you can use:

You can click on a single word (in the source language) and a pop-up window with Google-Translate will appear with the translation.

In order to see a translation for the whole sentence, please click on the reading-glass symbol. After doing so, a pop-up window with the translated sentence will appear in Google-Translate.

There is also a possibility to see the translation of the text in other languages as well. Just click on the language name on the left and choose a language you prefer from the drop-down menu:

Important issues related the translation

Attention 1

The first line of the block (in bold, with the symbol # at the beginning) is the title of the string and shouldn’t be translated!

Attention 2

There are several types of brackets used in the system, e.g. {link}, {email}, etc. The content of the brackets should not be translated, but the brackets as such should be adapted in the translations (see examples below).

The above mentioned brackets can be used only in those strings in which they appear in the source language. If the brackets are used anywhere else, they will not appear as text formatting, but as plain text.

The shape of the brackets is very important! If the brackets are not used properly, it can happen that all the texts below the brackets will not be shown correctly on the website. Please always make sure, that you use the correct brackets (the same as in the original language).

Example 1 (text formatting):

Brackets as {b}{/b}, {i}{/i} etc. are used for the text formatting. If they are not used in the translation, a simple text appears without formatting. That isn’t a big mistake and only influences text representation. {b}{/b} is for bold text and {i}{/i} for italic, however other text formatting can appear depending on texts.

Example 2 (system brackets):

Such brackets like {email}, {link}, {name}, {1} etc. are used for systemic purposes. They are so called variables - abstract container sizes in the programming language. That is why it is very important not to forget those brackets in the translation, otherwise important information will be missing in the translation, or even bigger errors can appear in that language version.

Attention 3

The design of the website and all texts is shown automatically. So please don’t add any other symbols than the ones used in the strings! E.g. such as • or ✔ . It’s possible to use special characters of your language of course.

Attention 4

All strings should be translated. If you leave a string untranslated, parts of text in source language (e.g. English or German) will appear in your language version. Don’t put any symbols (like e.g. ‘–’) instead of translations. If some strings are not relevant for your language version, please try to find an adequate solution, e.g. putting part of the previous paragraph to the next string or something like that.

Rules on various forms of plurality

Sometimes the strings can have the following form:

Sometimes the strings can have the following form:

In this string all singular and plural forms are indicated with the symbol "|" depending on the value of the {n} sign. Note that each language may have a different number of such forms, e.g. in English there are only two forms, in Arabic - six, in Russian - four and so on. This means that when translating such strings you must list all possible forms in your language in the correct order.

A list of all plural forms and their correct orders can be found in the following table: https://traduko.net/plural_rules

Here’s how the same string can be translated into different languages:

Thank you for your attention and cooperation!