This wiki has expanded far beyond its original scope, and in late 2008, the notion of translating it into languages other than English was raised. The large number of multilingual tropers means this dream is a distinct possibility, and by translating the wiki, we can gain perspectives form other cultures, and even a source of new tropes. This page will coordinate the various translation efforts.
A proposal for how the Translations will work in the future is here
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How do I start a new language fork?
First of all, decide what word to use for trope. In some languages, the word most similar to trope has certain other connotations that one would prefer to avoid. It is for this reason that the French version uses the word schéma; the Finnish version, on the other hand, seems to be using tropet (plural) as a neologism. It would be a good idea to make a translation thread in the forum to coordinate your specific fork.
Next, make a post in the "Translation Efforts" thread on the forum.
Begin by making a new namespace consisting of the standard two-letter code for your language. For example, if you wanted to make Dutch version, start by making a Nl/ namespace. This is as simple as editing Home Pages By Language and adding a link to the home page in your own language there; thus, somebody starting a Dutch version would enter [[Nl/HomePage Nederlands]] on that page. This will show up as a red link; click on it to begin translation.
Your first port of call will be to translate the English Home Page into your language. You may wish to edit it slightly.
Next, make a page in your namespace for the Tropes of Legend; naturally, this page should have an equivalent title in your language. The German version, for example, is called Tropen Der Legende.
Copy the list of tropes onto the new page. Come up with names in your language for as many as you can; if you can't think of a good name, just list it as ???? and hope that someone else will come up with a name. Include the English title next to the translated title in [square brackets] to keep track of everything. Be sure to put your namespace code (Nl/ or whatever) in front of each trope title in your language.
How should I go about translating a trope?
When you wish to translate a trope, open the English version in a new tab, then open up a primitive word processing program such as Notepad. Type up your new entry in this, using the English writeup as a guide. Note that it is not advisable to translate the English text directly — what you want is to get the information across. Thus, if you feel it could be better written in different words, do so.
Don't worry too much about examples; either don't translate them, or only translate a few. The best examples to translate are those that would be most familiar to speakers of your language, followed by those that illustrate a trope particularly well. Don't worry about the others; more examples will accumulate as the wiki grows.
Don't bother trying to translate puns; just come up with a title that makes sense in your language. By the same token, feel free to give your translations punny titles, provided they aren't too obscure. Also, if the English version of a trope is named after something, your version doesn't have to be named after it; it could be named after something else, or have a generic name. For example, the German version of The Scrappy is named Der Jar Jar, after Jar-Jar Binks of Star Wars infamy.
At the very bottom of every page, enter the following code: [[source:En:NameOfTrope]], where NameOfTrope is the title of the trope in English. This will automatically link the trope to all other versions of it, as well as linking all other versions to yours.
When you have the tropes of legend translated... it's not clear what else there is to do, because nobody's gotten that far yet.
What languages can I translate it into?
This wiki was designed for the English language, which completely lacks diacritical marks. This means you'll have to create pages without diacritical marks and use the custom title tool to request a custom title that displays them.
Typing diacritical marks can cause problems if the text is affected by any other markup. If it's affected by other markup, the characters can be entered via Alt codesnote (in Windows); note that leading zeroes in Alt codes are mandatory. If it isn't bold, italicised, or linkified, the following codes using ampersands (called "HTML Entities", should you need to look up one not listed here) should work, where the ampersand (&) marks the beginning of the "entity", the hash sign (#) is the letter you wish to type, the sequence between the hash (#) and the semicolon (;) denotes the kind of accent you wish to type, and the semicolon (;) marks the end of the entity:
- Acute accent: &#acute; (or ctrl+alt+# in Windows). For example, á will turn into á.
- Alt codes (uppercase): Á: Alt-0193; É: Alt-0201; Í: Alt-0205; Ó: Alt-0211; Ú: Alt-0218. A capital letter's Alt code is 32 less than its lowercase equivalent's Alt code.
- Alt codes (lowercase): á: Alt-0225; é: Alt-0233; í: Alt-0237; ó: Alt-0243; ú: Alt-0250. Since they are generally the most common accents in most languages that use them, they are probably the best to memorize and use as a reference.
- Grave accent: &#grave;. For example, È will turn into È.
- Alt codes (uppercase): À: Alt-0192; È: Alt-0200; Ì: Alt-0204; Ò: Alt-0210; Ù: Alt-0217. One less than the Alt code for that letter with an acute accent.
- Alt codes (lowercase): à: Alt-0224; è: Alt-0232; ì: Alt-0236; ò: Alt-0242; ù: Alt-0249. See above.
- Circumflex: &#circ;. For example, î will turn into î.
- Alt codes (uppercase): Â: Alt-0194; Ê: Alt-0202; Î: Alt-0206; Ô: Alt-0212; Û: Alt-0219. One more than the Alt code for that letter with an acute accent.
- Alt codes (lowercase): â: Alt-0226; ê: Alt-0234; î: Alt-0238; ô: Alt-0244; û: Alt-0251. See above.
- Tilde: &#tilde;. For example, ñ will turn into ñ.
- Alt codes (uppercase): Ã: Alt-0195; Ñ: Alt-0209; Õ: Alt-0213. In the case of 'a' and 'o', two more than the Alt code for that letter with the acute accent. For 'n', it's just below grave-accent 'o'.
- Alt codes (lowercase): ã: Alt-0227; ñ: Alt-0241; õ: Alt-0245. See above.
- Umlaut: &#uml;. For example, Ü will turn into Ãœ.
- Alt codes (uppercase): Ä: Alt-0196; Ë: Alt-0203; Ï: Alt-0207; Ö: Alt-0214; Ü: Alt-0220. Again, the code is one higher than the last.
- Alt codes (lowercase): ä: Alt-0228; ë: Alt-0235; ï: Alt-0239; ö: Alt-0246; ü: Alt-0252. See above.
- Cedilla: &#cedil;. For example, ç will turn into ç.
- Alt codes: Ç: Alt-0199; ç: Alt-0231. One less than grave-accent e.
- Caron: &#caron;. For example, Š will turn into Å .
- Alt codes: Š: Alt-0138
Once again, if you wish to use these symbols in a link, or in italics or bold, you'll have to input them directly, either by the Alt codes as mentioned above, or by using the keyboard for that language. Also, you can copy and paste most of them from this page, and you can probably also find them in Microsoft Word Help under 'Type International characters'. Finally, be sure you have an up-to-date web browser; all this hard accent-typing work might turn into gobbledygook if your browser doesn't interpret things correctly.
Until December 2023, page titles could not be translated into languages that are not written with the Latin alphabet (specifically the ISO-8859-1 encoding) for technical reasons. They would turn into HTML entities. With the database's conversion to UTF-8, this is no longer an issue.
Where can I find these translated pages?
If you want to help out with one of the current forks, just go to the relevant home page and start editing. You may wish to add your name here, too.
- Deutsch (German)
- Français (French)
- Español (Spanish)
- Esperanto
- Italiano (Italian)
- Magyar (Hungarian)
- Nederlands (Dutch)
- Norsk (Norse)
- Português (Portuguese)
- Suomi (Finnish)
- Svenska (Swedish)
Dragon Quest Z (aka Lord TNK) and Zetaseal have expressed interest in creating a Japanese version. This was not feasible for many years, until the storage encoding was converted to UTF-8.
