Project:Languages
Language Guidelines for SL wiki
This page discusses the guidelines on natural language uses and content translation of SL wiki (http://wiki.secondlife.com). Translation of SL Viewer UI is discussed on a separate page: How to Localize Your World. Information on a resident-run activity called I18N Project is available on Project:I18n.
At this moment, the contents on this page is just a set of proposals. Please feel free to have discussions on the associated discussion page or simply modify this page. It is expected, however, that in a future entire contents of SL wiki follow the revised guidelines on this page. If you are changing existing practices, someone needs to rewrite existing pages to follow the new rule.
So, if you have something to say on this issue, please start soon!
General
SL wiki generally follows the idea and mechanisms of MediaWiki site's language policy on Help pages, as opposed to that for Wikipedia's language versions.
Creating pages
Primary Language
English is the primary language of SL wiki.
English is chosen because it is the most common language in international communication today. It is not to give privilege to native English speakers. So, even if you are very good at English, please assume that readers are not fluent in English and use plain simple wording.
You may use foreign words or phrases in English sentences if it is needed. However, please avoid gentility uses of Latin, Greek or French.
Page titles
The title of a page in SL wiki should be based on English.
Although MediaWiki is powerful enough to allow non-English titles (i.e., use of any Unicode characters), SL wiki will not use the feature.
Non English contents
If you want to create a new page in non-English language, please consider to write it in two languages; one is English and another in your non-English language, making English page a primary page and the non-English page a translation. The English page need not be complete in this case. Just a brief summary is OK.
Even if you are not willing or lack enough skills to write the page in English, it is recommended to create an almost empty English page that only says something like "The content of this page is not available in English for the moment", and write your non-English page as a translation.
This way, other residents can eventually translate your contents into English without changing entire page structures.
Translation
It is welcome to translate pages on SL wiki into other languages.
Page titles
Translated contents are written in its own page.
The title of the translated page should be its corresponding English page title plus a code for a language, separated by a slash (/). For example, Dutch translation of the Main Page is titled Main Page/nl, as opposed to Hoofdpagina or Hoofdpagina/nl, where nl is the language code for Dutch. See Language code below for possible codes.
Language code is all in lower case.
Languages Template
Translated pages should be tagged with the {{Multi-lang}} template. English pages that have one or more translation should also. The {{Multi-lang}} template should be put near the top of the page and kept at the same location in translations of the same page.
Consistent use of {{Multi-lang}} template helps readers to find their preferred language versions of pages.
Note that the Template:Multi-lang is also available as another name Template:Languages for a historical reason.
Links
If you are linking to another page from a non-English page, and the target page has a translation of the same language, it's better to link to the translated page. Such links are better to have translated anchor.
For example, if you are writing a French page, and want to put a link to the French translated version of the page titled Voice, It's better to write the link as [[Voice/fr|voix]] then to write [[Voice/fr]].
Yes, this is somewhat inconveninent side-effect of the above guideline, that is, page title is always English based. (Express your opinions on the discussion page.)
If the target page has no translation to the same language, link to the primary (English) page.
Synchronization
Try to synchronize the contents of the translated page with the corresponding English page, though you, as a translator, have no duty to track the changes to the original page. Any residents who noticed the change are encouraged to update the translation.
Adding new info only on the translated page is hence dangerous, because some other resident may remove the addition to synchronize the contents. You need some clear indication if you add some.
Language Codes
SL wiki uses both ISO 639-1 (alpha-2) codes and ISO 639-3 codes for language identification.
When both are applecable, 639-1 alpha-2 code has a precedence.
(See discussion page for this point.)
List of language codes
As of this writing, the following language codes are used in SL wiki. The list will expand time-to-time.
| Code | Language |
|---|---|
| de | German |
| el | Greek |
| en | English |
| es | Spanish |
| fr | French |
| it | Italian |
| ko | Korean |
| ja | Japanese |
| nl | Dutch |
| pl | Polish |
| pt | Portuguese |
| zh | Chinese |
Note that an English page title has no language code attached, so there should not be a page of the title "Something/en". However, the code en for English appears on various locations.