Editing revision 1 of Languages and Translations

This website was started as a Russian wiki, but due to high demand multilingual functionality was added. This raised a couple of problems because it was highly unwanted to introduce extra complexity to the interface. Current solution is based on a couple of principles: * **You should feel free to write in any language**. Your contributions are welcome even if the language of your contribution is not the language of the rest of the page. * Translations are not separated into separate pages. Doing it other way will cause translations to go out of date quickly. * It should be easy to switch between translations without reloading the page (so that you can visually see the differences between translations). * Structure of the page should not depend on the language. * It should be possible to translate page incrementally. == Markup Let's say you have a page with these contents: {{{ This is a test. == Test 1 Text text == Test 2 Text text }}} This page has no translated parts and the sections are not marked. We can start by adding tags to places that we want to translate: {{{ #ENG This is a test. == Test 1 #ENG Text text == Test 2 Text text }}} Doing so will make {{{ENG / EST / RUS}}} buttons appear. Both **EST** and **RUS** will be marked red (no translations yet). Translated section only lasts till the next heading. Let's add some translations: {{{ #ENG This is a test. #RUS Это проверка. == Test 1 #ENG Text text #RUS Текст текст #EST Tekst tekst == Test 2 Text text }}} The order does not matter and some translations might be missing. That's fine, somebody else will add missing translations later. However, the headings are still not translated. Let's try to fix that: {{{ #ENG This is a test. #RUS Это проверка. == Test 1 / Proov 1 / Проверка 1 #ENG Text text #RUS Текст текст #EST Tekst tekst == Test 2 Text text }}} In other words, the syntax is: **English heading / Estonian heading / Russian heading**. Right now you cannot provide just two, either give all three translations or just leave one universal heading. == Advanced contributors **These recommendations are for advanced contributors. As a regular user you should not worry about these things.** * If you speak several languages equally then please prefer **English**. Estonian, Russian, and international students have no problems reading English text. For that reason this website defaults to English in various places. * Page names should be in English unless the page content is language-specific. E.g. it is OK to have a page called “Список предметов на русском языке” * If some section has to be translated but nobody is willing to write a translation then just put a language tag to this section. This will turn on the language buttons and missing translations will be shining red. Perhaps that will give some motivation to other contributors. * You can close some section spontaneously (far before the heading) by using {{{#LANG_END}}} tag. This should not be required most of the time.
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