Help:Translating

Volunteer help is urgently required translating this Manual online. If you would like to translate, please write to our feedback address for an account on this WIki.

The following is intended as "getting started" help for translators. It uses Spanish language as an example, but the essential parts of the process are the same for any language.

Getting Started
 Please log in to the Manual Wiki with the Username and Password you were given by e-mail. Please change your password after your first log in, by clicking "my preferences" at the centre top of the screen. Find a page that needs translating. To do this, go to the List of Pages and look for pages that do not have a suffix for your ISO 639-1 language code. For example, Spanish has a language code of "es", so any page which does not have an "/es" suffix has no Spanish translation. You can choose any page to translate, but you don't need to translate any pages that start with "Podcasting:". Note: English pages which have ToDo-1, ToDo-2 or ToDo links in a light brown colored "editornote" box may be subject to change. Look at the editornote to see if it might be best to leave that page (or the part of it that needs attention) until later.  Next, click the link for the English version of the page you want to translate (that is, the version that has no suffix).  When the page has loaded, click the "edit" tab at the top of the page, then select and copy all the text in the editor window underneath.  Click in the address bar of your web browser, and click at the start of &action=edit.  Type a forward slash followed by your two digit country code as at step 2. For example, if you were creating a Spanish version of a page you would type /es at the cursor so that the full URL looks something like http://manual.audacityteam.org/m/index.php?title=Tracks_Preferences/es&action=edit.  Hit ENTER on your keyboard - you will see a message "You have followed a link to a page that does not exist yet".  Click in the editor window, paste into it and click the "Save page" button at the bottom of the editor window.  Make the first line of your translated text the title of the page in your language thus: {{DISPLAYTITLE: As an example of a translated page, the first line of the page source in Recording Preferences/es reads: {{DISPLAYTITLE:Preferencias de Dispositivos}} Note that {{DISPLAYTITLE}} does not change the web address (URL) of the page. Now you can start editing the main body of the text. A good way of working is probably to click ENTER several times above a section in English, translate above that section, then delete the English text underneath. </ol> In the buttons at the bottom of the edit window, click Preview often to see what your work will look like. Please don't click "Save Page" for every edit, because this will log every single edit and make Recent Changes very hard for other editors to use.

Wiki syntax and conventions
You can use the buttons above the editing window to generate wikicode for common formatting like bold, italic and underline. There is some help with Wiki formatting at Help:Editing. You should also refer to Consistency for the style conventions we apply throughout the Manual.

Translating divs and spans
You will often see text that is enclosed inside   . Please do translate text inside the following divs:

Do not translate text inside "editornote" and "editsection" divs.

Text enclosed inside    will normally require translation.

Images
Images have text that appears as a tooltip when you hover over the image with the mouse. This text normally appears at the end of the syntax that displays the image and should be translated. So "Before Cut" would be translated in this example, while leaving everything else inside the double brackets untouched:



Links
Links can be confusing, so here's some extra help.

Text inside double square brackets is a link to other pages in the Manual Wiki. For example:

Quality Preferences

links to Quality Preferences.

Until that linked page is translated to your language, you will want to translate the text that appears for that link, but not change the page name the link goes to. To translate the text that appears for the link, add a pipe symbol "|" after the name of the linked page, then add translated text for the link.

For example in Spanish you would translate:

Quality Preferences

as:

Preferencias de Calidad

This would mean that the link in your page would appear as "Preferenecias de Calidad" but would still go to the English version of the page (Quality Preferences).

When the Quality Preferences page has been translated to your language, all links to the translated "Quality Preferences" page that appear on other pages will need to be changed thus: Preferencias de Calidad

You can click "What links here" in "Toolbox" in the Sidebar while on any page to find all the other pages that link to it.

If you find it easier, you could start draft translations for all the linked pages in the page you are currently working on. That way, once the linked to pages are translated, you do not have to go back to the page you started to translate and change the links from the English page to the translated page.

Text inside a single square bracket such as   is a link that goes outside the Manual Wiki. These links will often not have any link text after a pipe symbol, in which case you should leave the link untranslated. If there is link text following a pipe symbol, please translate that text.

Flags
Please add flag images as clickable links:
 * On your translated page, add the flag of United Kingdom to link to the English version of the page
 * On the English version of the page, add the flag for your country to link to your translated page
 * If the English version of the page contains flags for other countries, please add those flags to your translated page.



As an example, the code for the Spanish flag image link on AAC Export Options is:



Keep the Audacity software up-to-date
Other volunteers will be working on translating the latest code for the Audacity software. So to make sure your translations of the Manual are consistent with the translation as it appears in Audacity, please download the latest Nightly Build of Audacity (alpha) for your operating system.


 * Run Audacity in your language by going to the Interface tab of Preferences.
 * Download the alpha regularly to make sure it is up-to-date.

If possible, please capture and upload images of Audacity running in your language to replace the images of Audacity running in English. Be sure to initialize audacity.cfg so that Audacity is running with default Preferences.

Keep your existing translations up-to-date
It's a good idea to click "watch" top right of the English versions of pages you are translating. You will then be e-mailed when that English page changes so that you can update your translated page.

ToDo's for translated pages and pages under translation
Please see the ToDo-2i18n page for ToDo's that relate to translated pages and pages under translation. These are used to mark any translated page which needs attention before it is ready for the manual.

Examples are:
 * Un-translated content
 * Non-localized images
 * mixed-OS images on the same page (Consistency recommends Windows 7 Basic theme)