Translating the website into another language

The DoudouLinux.org website is available in several languages; however, translations may not be accurate or your language may be missing. In either case you can help us if you are willing. If improving an existing translation is required, you just need to contact us and send us a corrected version of the text. If you are willing to translate the website into a new language, then more involvement is required so that you can become a writer or a manager for a language of our website. Read more!

Important note: when translating pages related to applications, note that some applications, such as dictionaries, translators and conjugation tools, are not available in every language. Information about applications is to be adapted to the specific language version of DoudouLinux.

Translating sections

To translate the website into a new language, the first thing to do is to reproduce the section hierarchy. To do this, website administrators have to create a main section for the new language. Sub-sections are then created by duplicating sections as they appear in the website map into the new section. Contents of each section is then to be translated. It is better to have read the pages Organization of contents and Writing an article. Of course administrators should have created your account before: contact us!

Translating pages

In the website editing interface, the language management system associates to each reference article a list of its available translations. Most likely you will need to start creating a new translation for each article existing in the reference language [1] (or any other language that may sound more familiar to you). To do this you have to browse the article list of a given language then for each article, in the box “Article language and translations”, click on the link “Write a new translation for this article”. Then you get a new article containing the text to be translated.

Important note: if you do not follow the process described above to create a translation of a page, you will end with a page which is not linked to its translations. You can fix this by copying the reference article number in the block “Write a new translation for this article”, but it is obviously much easier to proceed the right way instead.

Please note that, as the website contents will be modified over the time, we will also need to modify the text of your translations. Information about changes will be posted on our dedicated mailing lists “docs”. For this reason, we need a website manager for each available language. If you are interested in doing this job, you will need to keep up the website contents evolution a little in order to bring the required modifications with the stream.

Translating recurrent texts

Some texts are displayed in nearly each page or section. For example this is the case of the text “Download” which is displayed on each page top. This kind of text must be translated when switching from one language to another. However, it is of course not directly part of the pages you will write, so you cannot translate it directly in the page editing interface. Instead you have to translate PO files for the resources named “website-download” and “website-squelette” on our TransiFex portal. Please refer to Translating applications for more information on PO files.

The resource website-download contains texts used in tables of downloadable files, as “website-squelette” contains texts involved in all web page skeletons. These PO files are then used by the web server administrator to update Php language translation scripts. This means that updating your PO files will not change your pages immediately. You have to wait for an administrator to take them into account.

Finally note that our editing software Spip has its own skeleton messages. If they are not translated into your language, you will have to ask us the Spip Php script to be translated.