Forum:About translations

Is Wikia supports non-English projects and non-English people? What you think about it? Look "About Wikia" with Russian interface (with Italian, French). What you see? Many English messages. Some languages (German, Chinese, Japan) translated better. But them are little part of exist languages. What do user should done when he can't understand what he see? Usualy he closes window. I translated Russian messages at internalisation.wikia.com (that often calls as "Wikia with long name", is it hard to name it i18n.wikia.com?) 5 months (sic!) ago. And what I see? English messages in Russian interface. I want to make Wikia better, I (and other users) may translate messages regularly, but I don't want to do work that nobody needs. May anybody sometimes check and update messages? Or, if Wikia supports only English, please tell it, and I will stop to ask such stupid questions. ~ putnik 23:13, 13 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Are you telling you know every language you named ?
 * Did you ever wander about some wikia in other languages ? Like fr.guildwars ? If you go there, you'll see many bits of the interface that is in french only. It was put in by me, moslty. On that wikia, there isn't any real good reason to provide english equivalent except if someday we get more users and they ask for it.
 * Aside that, everytime Wikia upgrade something, some bit of text on our french wiki return to english. Most of the time it's only for a few day (or a few weeks). But, i had many times to edit pages in the Mediawiki namespace :.
 * Wikia said to avoid doing this if i remember. But it's the only way i know that prevent the UI text from jumping back to english without warning. — TulipVorlax 03:09, 14 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I don't know every language, but I can distinguish them.
 * It's wrong way to translating interface of every wikia. Most of messages equal for all wikias. When I open fr.guildwars, I see Russian interface, not French (I saw French too). And I want to see good translation. You need not to translate your inteface to English. But basic messages at English look ok, isn't them? ~ putnik 12:35, 14 March 2008 (UTC)


 * The thing is, you can't count on everything to be translated in every language when they update or add things. It take time. And the fact that Wikia dont have staff for many of the languages they offer doesn't help one bit.
 * You see, currently on every talk page, they changed the + to "leave message" and it's not translated so in a few day, i will have to do it before too many new users comes by thinking that our french wikia is lame to have some part of it in english.
 * But yes, ideally, that sort of thing would not be needed. All languages string would always be properly updated. But we dont live in an ideal world. — TulipVorlax 15:50, 14 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Internationalization Wikia is deprecated; interface messages are translated through messaging.wikia.com, which can only be edited by Messaging sysops and Wikia Staff. --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 17:38, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
 * And how can one request this flag? I am interested to translate the messages to bulgarian (i started on Internationalization Wikia where I had a sysop flag) --DCLXVI 21:38, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmmm... --DCLXVI 08:09, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

I think what we need to do, is work out some system of allowing access on messaging.wikia. The problem is, that changes there affect 5800+ wikis, and it's particularly hard to monitor changes in many languages that few of us speak! Usually we rely on users to look out for each other in the good old wiki way. But where there might be just a couple of people active with knowledge of a language, and a big effect for all the wikis and users using that langauge... tricky.

For the moment, if you have a change or changes you want made, any member of the Community Team can help - just let us know -- sannse (talk) 17:41, 9 April 2008 (UTC)


 * The main problem is that when a MediaWiki: message in english is created, the default message in all other language for that message is then overwritten by that message in english, so every new page created breaks all other languages, and nobody take care of creating first the message in every language and then modify the english one so this couldn't happen. So the same message needs to be created on that 5800+ wikis (well, only the non-english ones, like 2000+ wikis?) --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) -WikiDex 18:57, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
 * That's an excellent point... I'd say that's a bug, I'll get it reported and hopefully fixed soon. -- sannse (talk) 20:31, 9 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I think that Betawiki or other wiki with Translate extension is a good idea to have the Wikia interface available in every language. --DCLXVI 20:08, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I'd like to rise again a similar issue. If you frequent wikis in different languages you get a messy language mix. Since user preference's are wikia-wide you have to choose the same language interface for all wikis. Since not all mediawiki messages are translated if your language preference isn't set to english, when visiting an english wiki you'll always get a mix of english and the language of your choice. It's confusing, I'd rather read in any of the two languages but not both at the same time. If the wiki you visit is neither in english nor in the language of your prefrence then you get THREE different mixed languages in the same single wiki. Some of the messages in the wiki's language, some in english and some in the language of your preferences. If not all of them use the latin alphabet and are written left to right, then it's babel tower falling all over again, on your brain. In short, user language preferences need to be more flexible. Does anyone else has this problem? Is anything that can be done about it?--Rataube 18:23, 11 April 2008 (UTC)