Technology

Translatewiki.net is using multiple assistive technologies to speed up translation work while producing better results.

Translation aids

The simplest translation aids are just a collection of potentially useful information.

Translations to other languages

You can choose any languages you wish to see when translating. Translations to chosen languages are displayed if they already exist. Translations into a related language give you ideas about words and grammar structures. Or you can just use it to learn about another language!

Message documentation

All software contains those tricky messages that are hard to understand, even with context. Chances are that those messages already have helpful documentation in translatewiki.net. Even if there is not, we will help you to get it. Just place your request on our support page. Documentation tells you about the context (button, title), contents of the variables and anything else you need to be aware of when translating.

Syntactic checks

We have implemented simple checks that alert you to simple mistakes like unused and unknown variables, bad HTML mark-up and unbalanced braces. These simple mistakes can often result in corrupt or broken display, so it is important to find them early.

Translation technologies

These are more advanced technologies which take advantage of achievements in areas of computer science and language technology.

Translation memory

We are using translation memory software from the translate toolkit. Translation memory helps you to make more consistent translations, and speeds up the translation of similar and repetitive messages.

Apertium machine translation

Apertium machine translation is one step forward from just displaying a translation into other languages. Apertium is an open-source machine translation engine which can translate between closely related languages. For supported language pairs and more information, see the homepage of Apertium.

Google and Microsoft translation

You can also take advantage of suggestions made by Google Translate or Microsoft Translator if your language is supported. No more manual copy-pasting, the suggestion is there already when you start translating!