User talk:Mdale

translatewiki.net
Introduction
Getting started
Translation tutorial
How to start
See also
Localisation guidelines
Translating offline
FAQ
Support

Welcome to Betawiki!

Hi Mdale. Welcome to Betawiki. Before you can use Special:Translate, and Special:Magic, please request translator rights at Betawiki:Translators. Please create a user page on which you describe which language(s) you will be working on. If you are going to be an active user here, please also add your name to the languages you will be working on at Translating:Languages. For an overview of the languages that are being worked on here, you can have a look at Translating:Developer log. Other useful pages can be Support and Import requests.

Once you have started translating, please remember to often request a commit of your translation work at Translating:Tasks. This makes the number of changes easier to handle for the devs.

I wish you a productive and pleasant stay. Cheers! Siebrand 12:35, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

• Timedmedia-started-transcode ("Started $1. $2")

What are $1 and $2? If $1 is one of:

• timedmedia-days
• timedmedia-hours
• timedmedia-minutes
• timedmedia-seconds

then won't the lack of a number for singular, cause a problem in the English version?

Please document parameter $1 in this message:

• Timedmedia-and ("and $1")

Thank you.

These two messages are unclear in English and need to be documented:

• Timedmedia-transcodeinfo ("Format")
• Timedmedia-direct-link ("Download")

Thank you.

Hi, thanks for your reply at mediawiki.org. Some of the points I have in mind are these:

• Some "lego" or "patchwork messaging" has been introduced (see list below). It would be great if this can be replaced by multiple full sentences in later releases. Please check the initial subsections of Internationalization hints for more details.
• Few if no variables are described here at translatewiki.net. Sometimes one can make an educated guess, most of the time it's a nightmare. It would be great if you could go through all messages and describe all existing variables, in a corresponding /qqq for each message with variables.
• Of particular immediate importance, are the following:

• fogg-please-install ("$1. More $2")

1. What goes in these variables? Is it fogg-please-install-install-linktext ("Install Firefogg") and fogg-please-install-about-linktext ("about Firefogg")? Other messages? Which?
2. Is fogg-please-install-install-linktext ("Install Firefogg") going to be the visible text of a link? If it is, it will need to be translated differently than it would, if it was used as plain text.
3. As a side note (actually, a central note :): A single message "[$1 Install Firefogg]. More [$2 about Firefogg]" for each possible installation would respond to the above and more all by itself.

• mwe-warning-upload-to-commons ("$1 recommends you upload to Wikimedia Commons, only upload locally after you have read $2")

1. What goes into $1? Is it one of rsd-this_wiki-title ("[[:MediaWiki:Rsd-this wiki-title/en]]") or rsd-this_wiki-desc ("[[:MediaWiki:Rsd-this wiki-desc/en]]")?
2. I guess that $2 will be mwe-local-upload-policy-link ("local upload policy"). If that is the case, shouldn't it be preceded by a "the"?

• mwe-not-logged-in-uploads ("You may not be logged in, so no recent uploads can be displayed. [$1 Please login] and [$2 try again].")

1. What goes in these variables? Is it mwe-loggin-link ("Please login") and mwe-try-again-link ("try again")? If that is the case, doesn't the word "login" appear twice in the sentence?

• fogg-badtoken ("Token is not valid")

1. What token is this referring to? Please answer in sufficient detail so I can identify it sufficiently to look for its translation, because I haven't the foggiest idea.

• mwe-stream_title ("$1 $2 to $3")

1. What in God's name are $1, $2 and $3? <title> <number> of <number>, <title> of ?

• mwe-local_resource_title ("Local resource title:")

1. What is local, the resource or the title? The current Spanish translation says "Title of local resource" and I recently changed the Portuguese translation from that to "Local title of resource" (because it makes more sense to me). If it is the title, consider changing it to "Local title of resource"

Finally, to end on a lighter note, hundreds of people around the world are, or will be at some point in time, guessing the answers to these questions (and possibly many more). Anything you can do to help, such as documenting all variables here, documenting whether any messages really need to be short and sweet (like button names, etc.), providing screen shots that at least show the real use of most of the messages (either here or at mediawiki.org), would contribute greatly to help the effort of those people and to make the extension truly usable in all the languages. Please consider spending a little of your time on this, as the benefits are potentially multiplied by the hundreds. Much appreciated for any time you can dedicate to it.

Additionally:

• Fogg-installed ("Firefogg is installed.")

1. This ends in a comma. Is it combined with other messages, and how?

Thanks for outlining these issues, and thank you for helping translate these extensions.

I will try and address the above mentioned issues soon. Some things like how the links are done are tricky because its done in javascript. But I will see if I can come up with something to support the [$1 Link Text] convention.

Also would be good to improve documentation for msgs like "$1 $2 to $3"

Thanks for your kind answer, Mdale. Anything that I can do to help, or indeed anyone else, please let us know.

There are more unclear variables in Add Media Wizard - Add Media message group:

What messages the variables stand in the following messages for?

• mwe-error-not-loggedin-file $1?
• mwe-upload-once-done $1? $2?
• mwe-ie-inline-upload $1? $2?
• mwe-no-import-by-url
• mwe-not-logged-in-uploads $1? $2?, see also above in the first message of Hamilton Abreu
• mwe-warning-upload-to-commons $2?, see also above in the first message of Hamilton Abreu

And which message follows message mwe-i-would-like-to?

these message issues should be resolved with the new [$1 link text] syntax. I will dive into fixing them soon.