Guidance for Linguistic Scribes

This page contains information on translating the Habitica Wiki; for information on translating Habitica see Guidance for Linguists.

Before starting to translate the wiki itself it is recommended that linguists translate the Whats New page first, as this is more useful for players from another language. See Creating & Editing Whats New Pages for more information.

All Linguistic Scribes should be fluent in the language they are translating into. It is better to have no translation than a bad translation because poor quality translations provide a negative impression of Habitica and can be misleading or incorrect. Please do not supply translations by using Google Translate or similar services; wiki readers who are willing to accept a poor translation can use Google Translate on the English version of the page themselves. Providing a poor translation can also prevent a more fluent translator from working on a page because they might not realize that the translation needs work if they don't read the page thoroughly.

Please read all the steps below before you start translating.

Find or Request a Wiki for Your Language

Habitica wikis already exist for the languages in the table below. Habitica admins will create it and its home page, arrange for it to be able to use the images from the English wiki, set up stylesheets, and add you as an admin of the wiki (in addition to some admins from the English wiki).

URL	Language	English name
habitica.fandom.com/da	Dansk	Danish
habitica.fandom.com/de	Deutsch	German
habitica.fandom.com/es	Español	Spanish
habitica.fandom.com/fr	Français	French
habitica.fandom.com/it	Italiano	Italian
habitica.fandom.com/ja	日本語	Japanese
habitica.fandom.com/nl	Nederlands	Dutch
habitica.fandom.com/pl	Polski	Polish
habitica.fandom.com/pt-br	Português Brasileiro	Brazilian Portuguese
habitica.fandom.com/ru	Русский	Russian
habitica.fandom.com/tr	Türkçe	Turkish
habitica.fandom.com/zh	中文 (简体 & 繁體)	Chinese (simplified and traditional)

Translating

It is recommended that you only create a page in your wiki when you are ready to translate it. If a non-English wiki contains a high proportion of English pages, it is harder for users to find content in their own language and harder for Habitica admins to judge when you have earned contributor tiers for your translation work.

Please translate each page fully before starting another page.

Preparation + Copying

The first step is to navigate to the location where you want the translated page to appear. To do this, first go to the front page of the target language Wikia and look at the address bar, which will say:
habitica.fandom.com/xx/wiki/Habitica_Wiki -- "xx" being the language code of the target language.

We will use the Pets page as an example. The source language (English) page is:

habitica.fandom.com/wiki/Pets

The target language (here German) page is:

habitica.fandom.com/de/wiki/Haustiere

You will notice that only the language code and the text after the "/wiki/" has changed. The text after the "/wiki/" defines where the translated page will be created. This is the location that you have to navigate to.

Once there you will see an empty page with a "create" button where you would normally see an "edit" button. Press the "create" button. You have now entered the Editor.

With the editor open, you now need the source language text (the English page). To get the text, you have to open another browser/window/tab, navigate to the page you want to translate and click "edit".

You should now have both editors open. Copy the source code of the English page to the target language Wikia page and publish.

NOTE: Sometimes copying in visual mode is preferable (if pictures within tables are involved, or a lot of templates, as it is the case with the Class pages). But generally, you will copy the source.

Example:

1. Look at the /wiki/Pets editor. At the top right, there are two tabs. One says "Visual", and one says "Source".
2. Click on the "Source" tab.
3. The screen will be filled with the source code of the page. Copy everything (it does not matter whether you understand it all at this point).
4. Once you have copied the source code the browser/window/tab is no longer needed, so it can be closed.
5. Change to the /wiki/Haustiere editor.
6. Go to source mode (if you are not already using it).
7. Paste the source code, write a summary of your edit ("created" or something), then publish your edit.

This might look terrible, but that is acceptable for now.

The next step is to insert all required images and templates from the English Wikia to the target language Wikia. Templates can sometimes be skipped if they contain no important information.

Images can be inserted without the need for copying them to your wiki. Simply use the same file name that is in the English wiki. It doesn't matter if you use the english prefix "File" or the equivalent word from your language, like "Datei" in German or "ファイル" in Japanese: File:Pet-Fox-Onyx.png, Datei:Pet-Fox-Onyx.png, ファイル:Pet-Fox-Onyx.png etc. will all end up displaying the same image. The only time you need to host an image on your own wiki is if it contains text and you want to provide a non-English version of it.

After this step, the pages should look nearly identical.

Translation

The process of actually translating the pages is what you are here for.

It is important to note which terms to translate and which terms to leave as they are. "Feature" is a word that is often present in other languages. "Daily" and "To Do" might prove challenging.

Another equally important guideline is to stick to the existing vocabulary. If there is a name for something already, reuse that word. Do not invent new words for the same thing. Your translation might not sound as good in your head, but for usability, it is necessary to refer to the same thing with the same word. If you really think you have a better solution, discuss it first.

The following pages are the first that should be translated and maintained on any translation Wikia:

- Front page
- Class_System
  -Warrior
  -Mage
  -Rogue
  -Healer
- Pets
- Mounts

You should add the following template to every page you translate: {{Translation}}

Sort Order

Wikia sorts articles and categories by their titles using Unicode sort order. While this works well for English, it can cause pages in other languages to be sorted differently from the sort order usually used in that language. To avoid this, you can set the DEFAULTSORT variable on a page to move the page to a more appropriate position. Anywhere on the page you want to change the position of, insert:

{{DEFAULTSORT:new sort key}}

What you use for the new sort key will depend on the sorting rules in your language, and it is recommended that you discuss this with other translators working on your wiki. As an example, inserting:

{{DEFAULTSORT:A Faire}}

into the French page À Faire will ensure that it is sorted with other pages starting with "A", rather than after "Z".

This technique can also be used to sort articles by a word other than the first word in the title. For example, you could set sort keys for all articles starting with "The" so that they are arranged by the second word, rather than having many pages under "T".

Add Language Links

When your work is done, add a language link to the bottom of each translated page and its English counterpart. To learn how this is done, read Help:Interlanguage links.

Example: [[en:Guidance for Linguistic Scribes]] (would link to this page from another language)

Example: [[fr:Conseils pour les Linguistes du Wiki]] (would link to the French page)

Note that on translated (i.e., non-English) wikis, only English interlanguage links should be provided. Exceptions to this are possible wherever they seem useful, but have to be agreed upon by linguistic scribes of both languages. (For example, the French and the German wiki both link to each other as well as to the English wiki, because there is a significant number of people who speak both French and German.)

Since interlanguage linking is not set up automatically, you will have to add one interlanguage link per page, as shown in the example: The interlanguage link for the English page goes on the French page, and the interlanguage link for the French page goes on the English page, etc. This is the reason that cross-language links (between multiple non-English wikis) should be kept to a minimum. Too few people are likely to go between translated wikis to justify the effort of linking each translation and updating all existing pages to reflect new language wikis and pages. Those who do want to go from one non-English wiki to another can use the English wiki as an intermediary.

Contributor Tier Process

Habitica no longer awards tiers for work on the wiki. If you are interested in gaining a Contributor Tier for linguistic work, it would need to be translations of the actual Habitica content.

Initial Creation of Wiki by Administrators

This section contains information for the English wiki's admins to help them set up a new wiki in another language. This section can be ignored by translators.

It is recommended a new wiki to only be set up if there is a willing team of 3 contributors or more in the selected language, and the Whats New Page is being regularly updated.

Show/Hide instructions

1. Click on the "Start a wikia" button in the header of any wiki page and enter information in the dialog that appears:
   1. In the Name field, enter exactly "Habitica".
   2. Allow the Address field to be created automatically and do not change it for any reason.
   3. Select the language. It is vital that you choose the right one, otherwise, there will be trouble with language linking later. If you don't know the two-character code for the target language, you can look up the ISO code and look for the value in the "639-1" column for the desired target language.
   4. Click the "Next" button which will take you to a second screen.
   5. In the "What's your wiki about?" field, enter "Your Life, The Role Playing Game".
   6. In choose a hub, select "Games".
   7. For "Check additional categories", do not tick any checkboxes.
   8. Click the "Create My Wiki" button which will take you to the "Choose your theme" page.
   9. Select the first theme.
   10. Click the "Show me my wiki" button which will take you to the new wiki's front page.
   11. Cancel the "Congratulations! You successfully created Wikia Habitica" popup. Do NOT click on the "Add a Page" button.
2. Go to the English wiki's front page and open it in the source mode editor. Copy the entire contents to your clipboard. Close the editor without making changes.
3. Open the new wiki's front page in the source mode editor and paste in the entire contents of the English front page.
4. In the welcome box, replace "The wiki is also available in other languages: {{Other Languages|compact}}" with "The wiki is also available in [http://habitica.fandom.com/ English] and other languages (available from the English wiki's home page)." We do not list all the languages in the welcome box because then every wiki's home page would need to be updated when a new wiki is created.
5. At the bottom of the page, replace the list of languages with "[[en:Habitica Wiki]]". Do not worry if that link does not work after the page has been saved.
6. Save the home page. Do not worry that it looks terrible at the moment. Do not start copying images from the English wiki, not even the Habitica logo.
7. Go to Category:Homepage Templates on the English wiki. Copy all templates you find there to the new wiki (see the tip below about copying files). This should make the new wiki's home page look better. Any remaining problems are likely to be fixed by the steps below.
8. Set up administrators:
   1. Go to habitica.fandom.com/wiki/Special:UserRights on the English wiki.
   2. Edit the URL to change habitica.fandom.com to the domain name for the new wiki (i.e., add a slash (/) and the language's abbreviation after habitica.fandom.com). This will take you to the correct form for adding administrators to the new wiki.
   3. Add LadyAlys, cTheDragons, and Taldin as administrators (give them all available permissions). Also, add the person who asked for the wiki to be created (you will need to find out the name that their Wikia account uses); the Special:Listusers page might help.
9. Go to Wikia's Community Central:Interlanguage link requests page and follow the instructions there to request language linking from the English wiki to the new wiki. After Wikia staff have done that, the link to the English wiki at the bottom of the new wiki's home page should start to work.
10. This set of sub-steps must be performed by a person who is an administrator on both the new wiki and the English wiki.
    1. Go to the form for contacting Fandom staff.
    2. Select "I would like to make changes to a wiki" and wait for other form fields to appear.
    3. Enter the email address and username that you use on the wiki into the appropriate fields.
    4. Select the language that you'd prefer to use for communicating with Fandom staff.
    5. For "Please choose the category that best fits your issue" choose "I want a feature or extension turned on".
    6. For "URL of the wiki" enter the URL for the new non-English wiki.
    7. For "What feature do you want enabled?" choose "JavaScript".
    8. For the subject, enter text like "JavaScript editing and image reuse from habitica.fandom.com to new translated wiki".
    9. For the description enter text like "Hello. I'm an admin of http://habitica.fandom.com/ and [URL]. Could you please enable the JavaScript review process on [URL]? Please could you also allow [URL] to be able to use the images from http://habitica.fandom.com/ ? Thank you!". Change "[URL]" to the URL of the new wiki in both places it appears.
    10. Submit the form.
    11. Wait a day or two for Wikia staff to enable JavaScript editing and image sharing. After they have done that, the Habitica logo will automatically appear on the new wiki's home page (as will other images on other pages that are created by copying the source code from the English wiki). You can then proceed with the steps below.
11. Copy each of the stylesheets and JavaScript files below to the new wiki (see the tip below about copying files). Ignore any of these files if they show nothing but 404 errors on the English wiki (those files are not in use yet). Note that changes to the JavaScript files will not take effect until after they have been reviewed by Wikia staff.
    • MediaWiki:Wikia.css
    • MediaWiki:Common.css
    • MediaWiki:Monobook.css
    • MediaWiki:Common.js
    • MediaWiki:Wikia.js
    • MediaWiki:Monobook.js
12. Adjust the Theme, Wordmark, FavIcon, Templates, Color set, Top Menu. More info to come.
13. Enable any features on the lower left side of the new wiki's Special:AdminDashboard page that you would like to use and are not enabled by default (some (e.g., badges/achievements) may need to be enabled by sending a request via Special:Contact). (Note: the links here go to the English wiki; please adjust the URL for the new wiki.)
14. Add the new wiki's URL and the language name (not the English version of the name) to the English wiki's home page in the Welcome box and in the list of languages at the bottom of the home page (do not worry if that latter link does not work yet; it will when Wikia staff have enabled interlanguage linking).
15. Add the new wiki's details to the table of wikis in Guidance for Linguistic Scribes.
16. Tell the person who requested the wiki that they can now translate the home page and then start translating other pages.

Tip: When copying files (such as templates, stylesheets, and JavaScript files) from the English wiki to the new wiki, the easiest method is below. Do not do this from any of the non-English wikis because if you do, the final file names will be wrong!

1. On the English wiki, open the file in the source editor.
2. Copy the entire contents to the clipboard.
3. Do not save or cancel from the source editor!
4. Adjust the page's URL to add the new wiki's language abbreviation at the start of the URL and hit enter on your keyboard. You will now find yourself in the source editor for the same file in the new wiki.
5. Paste from your clipboard. If there is already content there (e.g., default styles with comments in the new wiki's language), then do not overwrite that content. Instead, paste the English wiki's material below it, then search through that English material to find the comments and code that match the existing content, and delete that English material.