Extension:Translate
Translators (main help page)
- How to translate
- Best practices
- Statistics and reporting
- Quality assurance
- Message group states
- Offline translation
- Glossary
Translation administrators
- How to prepare a page for translation
- Page translation administration
- Unstructured element translation
- Group management
- Move translatable page
- Import translations via CSV
- Working with message bundles
Sysadmins and developers
The Translate extension enhances MediaWiki with essential features needed to do translation work. It enables in-wiki translation and proofreading. It can be used to translate the content pages, the interface of the wiki and even other software products, as it is used at translatewiki.net and to manage multilingual wikis.
Features
The Translate extension has many features specifically targeted to translators, while making back-end integration with actual source code as easy as possible. Meanwhile, everything runs inside MediaWiki, which allows users an almost endless degree of freedom for communication and self-organization.
Features include:
- Structured wiki content page translation, from various languages at the same wiki.
- In-wiki localisation and exporting of software interface messages (or just about anything).
- Web-based translation and proofreading interface, as well as gettext based export and import for off-line translation.
- Various aids to make the job of translators easier:
- display of translations in globally defined other languages, optionally expanded with user defined languages;
- collaborative editing of documentation of the use and context of messages;
- translation memory and machine translation with external tools (Apertium, Microsoft Translator, Yandex.Translate);
- display of the latest change in the source message;
- warnings about common mistakes like parameters that are not used.
- Pre-made modules for various open source products you can use as an example.
- Support for various formats including: PHP, Java properties, Gettext, YAML and AndroidXml. Learn more about file format support (FFS) classes and see the full FFS list.
- A versatile plug-in system to make it easy to add new projects as a message group.
- Various statistics:
- translation completion percentages for all message groups in all supported languages;
- translation completion percentages in all supported languages for any supported message group;
- tool for making activity graphs for spans of time. Can display either number of edits or active users daily or hourly and includes many filters;
- cloud overview of active languages and translators.
Translate extension, due to its large user base, is confirmed to be compatible with all reasonably recent browsers, except some minor (style) glitches which are quickly fixed.
- Making Multilingual Wikis a Reality: this presentation shows how the Translate extension can make a wiki truly multilingual, based on the experience of KDE UserBase wiki.
- Niklas Laxström, Translating the wiki way: Simple, fast, fun, Wikimania 2012 (slides available).
Support and documentation
- See Installation
- See Configuration
- See User documentation – includes tutorials
- Live support at #translatewiki IRC channel at Libera Chat (best times are at European days and evenings)
- Please report all issues and feature requests in the issue tracker
Translate extension was originally developed by User:Nikerabbit; many other users, like User:Raymond, User:SPQRobin and the Wikimedia Language team, have contributed to its code and documentation.
Prominent users of the Translate extension
- https://translatewiki.net – The biggest wiki-based site and community for translation of the interface of open source software.
- https://userbase.kde.org – Documentation wiki for the KDE project which uses the page translation feature extensively.
- https://meta.wikimedia.org – Translates wiki content and uses the group states feature. Translation and translation review is enabled almost for all users of the wiki.
- https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/
See more at notable uses of translatewiki.net on Wikipedia.
Testimonials
Tom Hutchison of Joomla:
The Translate extension allows for connection to a translation service and can auto fill the translation for you. At the same time a translator can make adjustments so you're not creating lots of pages with inaccurate translations.
That's ok if they are on different continents. That is actually a plus because work is getting done 24 hours a day. What they need is a support group chat for each other. They would all be able to read English if they are translating right? Teach a few simple wiki markup such as links and what to do with categories. Then they help others who in turn help others. We have over 40 in a chat who help each other and have fun at the same time. And they were all scared of the wiki but couldn't believe how easy it was once they started. They are actually waiting on me for more translations to do because I can't keep up with them. I know there is only 1 translating this language or that language. We have that too. One person is doing Swahili while another one is working on Japanese. Also, you mark pages for translation. You control whether to include templates or exclude variables in template calls.
See also
- Help:Extension:Translate
- Translatable template.
- Extension:TranslationNotifications – an extension to facilitate communication with translators.
- Help:Extension:Translate/Page translation example
- Extension:Semantic Interlanguage Links
Not to be confused with:
- Extension:ContentTranslation tool – used for one-off translation of wiki pages from one language to another.
- m:Abstract Wikipedia for translation.
How to contribute
 | This extension is being used on one or more Wikimedia projects. This probably means that the extension is stable and works well enough to be used by such high-traffic websites. Look for this extension's name in Wikimedia's CommonSettings.php and InitialiseSettings.php configuration files to see where it's installed. A full list of the extensions installed on a particular wiki can be seen on the wiki's Special:Version page. |
 | This extension is included in the following wiki farms/hosts and/or packages: This is not an authoritative list. Some wiki farms/hosts and/or packages may contain this extension even if they are not listed here. Always check with your wiki farms/hosts or bundle to confirm. |