Help:Foreign languages

This page describes how foreign languages are supported in MEpedia.

Language settings
There are two language settings in MEpedia: Our basic goal is to match the reader's preferred language to a page with the correct content language.
 * The reader's preferred language
 * The pages's content language

How to translate a page

 * 1) Find the English-language page that will be translated.  If there is no English-language page, then create one.  If you don't have time to finish the English-language page, you can mark it as a "Stub" with the "Stub" template tag.
 * 2) Create a new page with the English name followed by "/" and then the language code.  For example, if the English language page is named "Abbreviations", and you want to create a German version of the page, create a new page called "Abbreviations/de".
 * 3) Set the new page's content language to the correct language using Special:PageLanguage.
 * 4) (optional) If you really want to have a page name in the foreign language, such as using "Abkürzungen/de" instead of "Abbreviations/de", you can:
 * 5) Move "Abbreviations/de" to "Abkürzungen/de".  (This will leave a redirect from "Abbreviations/de" to "Abkürzungen/de".)
 * 6) Create a redirect from "Abkürzungen" back to "Abbreviations".  Note that this redirect does NOT use language codes!
 * 7) Be aware that the inter-language links in the lefthand sidebar will NOT show up when viewing "Abkürzungen/de", but they should show up correctly when viewing "Abbreviations/de".

Translating the user interface
MEpedia's user interface stores its text in messages stored in the "MediaWiki:" namespace. Each message is translated into foreign languages. If you notice a specific piece of the user interface that needs to be translated into a specific foreign language, you can:
 * 1) Find the "MediaWiki:" page that stores that user interface message.  In your browser's address bar, add "?uselang=qqx" to the end of the URL.  This should show the names of the "MediaWiki:" pages that correspond to each part of the user interface.  For example, the text for the "Main page" link at the top of the lefthand sidebar is stored in the "MediaWiki:mainpage-description" page.
 * 2) Translate the "MediaWiki:" page into the specific foreign language and store that translation in a page named after the "MediaWiki:" page, but with "/" and the language code at the end of the page name.  For example, the French translation of "MediaWiki:mainpage-description" should be stored in "MediaWiki:mainpage-description/fr".

Translating "Template:" pages
See MEpedia:Template translation.