Category Translation

As you may know we intend to make some important changes to UserBase over the next few months. Language translation is one of the areas that we want to make much easier, so we have been running tests on a sandbox wiki and talking to some of our more prolific translators about problems and solutions.

One aspect that has been brought to our attention is the fact that currently, page names and categories will only appear in English. With regard to page names, Yurchor has done some work on this, and we'll follow that up shortly. First, though, I want to tackle the problem of categories, because I see them as the easy way to guide users into finding other pages of similar interest.

The current system, such as it is, means that you get pages such as Applications, Applications_(de), Applications_(uk), Applications_(zh). This is unsatisfactory on at least two counts - first that we end up with a very cluttered list of categories, making it difficult to find things, and second, even more important, it still depends on the reader recognising the English category name. Even worse, some readers will not be familiar with Latin script. I propose that we use translations of category names. However, we feel that this needs to be controlled, so that consistency is easy.

One way we could do that is to create a table of categories and translations, on this page, for reference by all translators. It would have to be built up over a period, but it means that once one translation of a term has been used, all future category translations will use exactly the same term. If this is felt to be the answer, I'll create a skeleton table for translators to fill as necessary.

I'm willing, too, to listen to any other suggestions. The only criteria is that it should be easy to follow when created, and easy to use while being created. Please post your thoughts here.--annew 17:04, 2 January 2010 (UTC)