Translation Workflow

This page attempts to define the workflow for migration to the new translation system and for using the new system.

Migration

Urgently required - On all pages, any empty lines below headings should be removed, as it is preferred that a heading is translated at the same time as the first paragraph of its content.
Check that the page has a Category statement as in

[[Category:System]]

   < languages / > 
   < translate >

to the top of the page, and < /translate > at the bottom. There should be no spaces inside the angle-brackets.

Any page that is seen to be seriously and hopelessly out of date should not be marked for translation during the migration period. Those pages can be translated afresh at the later stage.

You must request that your user account is added to the group of Translators. Only listed Translators, logged in, can see the prompts and create translations.
Ensure that a table of Category translated words for your language exists. You can check using the links on http://userbase.kde.org/Translation_Help_Needed
During the migration period it is expected that we will need to keep the old language-bar as well as showing the new one. This will inevitably look a little messy, so we'll keep the period as short as possible. The idea is that you, or anyone with enough understanding of the language to recognise what is being said, can access the old version and simply copy/paste the relevant sections into the new translation page.
Some pages were translated very early on in the life-cycle of KDE 4.x and never updated. It's probably best to ignore these for the first run through, so we will not mark such pages as ready for translation.

An English-speaking editor marks the page as ready for translation.
A logged-in Translator sees "Translate this page" at the top of the page.
Clicking on that link takes you to a page, Special:Translate, where you can choose whether to view every section or untranslated sections relating to the page. This is useful if you need to do it in consecutive sessions.
1. You then need to select your language from the drop-down list.
2. Clicking on the first blue link begins the translation process. Each completed section has to be uploaded. If your page consists of many short sections that can be annoyingly slow. Some find that it helps to open groups of four or five sections in tabs, so that you can be working on the next one while waiting for an upload to finish.
When you have finished, or run out of time for the current session, you select "Return to List". You can then use the link above the section list to return to the English page. Your language code will have been added to the list of translations for the page.

The Translate extension offers the possibility of exporting to a .po file which can be used by tools such as Lokalize. If you choose to do it this way, please be aware of the possibility of someone else working on the same page. Unless we come up with a better solution, I'd suggest that we get a template rather like the {{Being_Edited}} one. We have yet to experiment with how this can be achieved, since the page is not created until you actually start the first translation of a page.