Help:Internationalization



i18n: short form of internationalization (18 chars between i and n)

Rationale
Wikia is a true multi-lingual company and we host wikis in more than 120 languages. While most of our visitors come from the US or other English speaking countries, there are still a huge amount of people who aren't able to understand English well or even at all.

So it's important to always keep in mind that all features need to operate in other languages - languages which not only use different words, but sometimes also different grammar (word ordering!). You can help to make a feature available in your mother language.

How can I help making Wikia available in my language?

 * 1) Create an account at Translatewiki.net (and log in).
 * 2) Create a user page. This may include some information about you and should include some Babel boxes (see this user page for a simple example).
 * 3) Request translator rights by clicking "add a new request".
 * 4) Change subject to  (if you like to translate messages into German - otherwise replace 'de' with the ISO-Code of your chosen language.)
 * 5) Write a message like: "I would like to help translating into German."
 * 6) As soon as you get the translator rights, this is the entry point to start translating.
 * 7) Translate and have fun!
 * 8) If you have any questions or if you find some problems inside Wikia's messages, drop a note to Avatar or use Wikia's discussion page.

How does internationalization work?
Since January 2010 Wikia has been working with the translatewiki.net community to provide a convenient translation medium for everyone who likes to help us with localization.

This has many advantages for us - including:
 * Working closely together with the big Translatewiki.net community.
 * The possibility to add descriptive text to messages.
 * Automatically generated statistics showing the progress per language.
 * No more messages in foreign languages accidentally overwriting English ones.
 * No more missed messages.
 * ... and more.

There is currently one big disadvantage for this in comparison with the previous way of internationalization via Messaging Wikia:
 * The translations will be imported back into our system only once a week.

Because of this, messages for extensions in development and urgent fixes will still be made on Messaging - but all normal translation work should be handled via translatewiki.net.

Most useful links
Some links to check out:


 * Wikia's home on TWN
 * Language statistic for Wikia's extensions
 * People who help to translate Wikia stuff
 * Questions and error reports
 * Translation entry point