A proposal for handling other languages in 2.0

Huh. How is the interface/UI handled in your proposal, Fighteer?

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Despite his claims of avoiding the language in the URL, ~Fighteer has twice mentioned the language appearing at the end of the URL.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

There are many ways it can be done. The language that an article will be displayed in will be part of the URL, but which part is something we can hash out. I do not want to make the language a namespace, but the idea of namespaces is kind of going away with 2.0.

edited 8th Mar '17 5:43:12 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Well, if titles in UR Ls will go away anyway, we won't need English UR Ls for non-English pages anymore. Not that we need them now, but we won't need them once 2.0 comes around.

Getting rid of namespaces means that we'll finally be able (and required; that, too) to use concepts like Trivia, YMMV or Tear Jerker in all languages. Besides, we'll finally be able to create different pages for different media with identical titles along with trope articles with that same title if necessary.

Nonetheless, we need a way to link to foreign-language versions of pages. I mean, we used to have them, but right now, hardly anyone even knows that there are translated pages which also explains the decrease in activity in some translation efforts (I sometimes feel like being the only Troper working on German pages who doesn't need a translator).

The concept of pre-selecting language preferences in your profile has been mentioned. I wouldn't recommend that as the only way to pick the language in which to read an article because Tropers may want to read and work on pages in multiple languages. Links for easy language switching must be provided. That said, some means of showing visitors TV Tropes in a language they're familiar with might be nice, be it by identifying your location via your IP address, be it with additional top level domains.

One more thing: If we want to keep the translations going and improve them, we'll also have to translate TV Tropes' surface. It isn't really convenient, especially not for non-English speakers, to have articles in their languages embedded in a page that's English otherwise.

Welcome to the Signature, Mon

I never said that titles would go away. It will be possible to link to an article using its internal ID, but the friendly URL that the wiki recommends for general use will include the article's title.

What's important is that, behind the scenes, all the translated titles will be considered part of the same article, so if you link to "Hóla", it'll know you mean "Hello" as the former is a known alternate-language title of the latter. Moreover, linking to "Hóla" could automatically cue the software to know that you want the Spanish version of the page. Or, you could link to "Hello/es", and it would mean the same thing (ditto "Hóla/en").

There are obviously issues to be worked out with this, but the basic idea is to have it be as transparent as possible to the user. And yes, we will need a project to localize all the UI text. Not looking forward to that, I tell you.

edited 17th Mar '17 8:30:31 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

So, it would be kind of similar to the redirect system we currently use in some languages, were Fr/Wiki Word brings you to Lien Wiki? (except it only works one way because we figured the English readers wouldn't be huge fans of a sudden flood of redirects)

Ideally, it would work that way. If you don't specify an explicit language parameter, then we have to decide whether the language used in the title wiki word or your default language preference would determine the outcome.

For example...

• If you click on WikiWord (just that, no modifiers), and your default language is English, there's no issue — you go to the Wiki Word page.
• If you click on WikiWord and your default language is French, would you go to the English page or Lien Wiki? *
• If you click on LienWiki and your default language is English, would you go to the English page or the French page? *
• If you click on Fr/WikiWord, you'd obviously be telling it you want the French version, and similarly with En/LienWiki. No issues there.

There are no issues with redirects here. In 2.0, all of those are the exact same article according to the wiki software. The difference is that the text components are localized, so that there exist English, French, etc. versions of the description and title (and examples, if any). Your language choice would determine which localization is shown to you.

Note that the reason why this is a problem in the current design is that all of those language-specific pages are distinct articles. We intend for that to go away in 2.0.

* Also worth noting is that, if "LienWiki" and "WikiWord" exist as French and English language versions of the title of the article, then the renderer would display the language version that you're viewing the current page in, by default. So it would not generally be possible for someone reading in English to even see the French text, unless whoever created the link explicitly specified the language as a component.

edited 17th Mar '17 9:13:49 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

This would also raise the question of pages that have the same title in multiple languages, and of language-specific pages.

I think such a system may be prone to language mishmash.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Any title collisions due to language would give highest weight to the user's preferred language. If there is still ambiguity, an automatic disambiguation would be generated.

It's not really any different from the current situation, save that 2.0 will have explicit mechanisms to specify which article you mean in the links.

If we find that it's generating too much ambiguity, we could make the language an explicit, required part of the URL, as in "en.tvtropes.org" and "fr.tvtropes.org". I was hoping to avoid that, but c'est la vie.

Do we even have enough translators for all the work that would be required? At best, this is an ad-hoc project, with pages localized as resources permit.

edited 17th Mar '17 9:22:38 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

We most likely won't. By default, the most likely outcome is that most pages won't have translations. Doubly so if the current all-English interface is not changed.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

That makes me think that if the link is displayed as LienWiki, it should go to the French page and vice-versa. I like the idea of using a language namespace (like Fr/WikiWord) to force users to the specified language version of the page. With the 2.0 design, we can stack namespaces, right? Fr/Characters/StarWars would take you to the French version of the characterization trope list of Star Wars, right?

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Yes, except that they aren't really namespaces in the new concept, but more like category tags.

Wiki URLs would decompose into parameters based on heuristic analysis. For example, take Fr/Characters/StarWars:

• 'Fr' would be recognized as a language tag and would decompose into:

  ?lang=Fr

• 'Characters' would be recognized as a subpage tag and would decompose into:

  ?view=Characters

• 'StarWars' would be recognized as a title and would decompose into:

  ?title=StarWars

Thus, the final decomposition would look like:

https://tvtropes.org/wiki?title=StarWars&view=Characters&lang=Fr

At that point, the wiki parser takes "title=StarWars" and searches the titles database for it. It may find several articles, but the one with the highest priority will be the Star Wars franchise page. It then looks to see if there is a defined Characters hierarchy for this article (this is a separate topic) and, if so, renders it. Last, it will look for French language description and title elements for each of the components of the assembled article view and use them in preference to the default English elements.

I still don't know if it would be better to display anything missing French translations in English or just omit it. Maybe we could have a special "translator" view that shows all translated elements for a language alongside ones that are missing translations, with the user prompted to click on those and provide translated versions.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 21st 2019 at 9:38:26 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

それと、特定言語では編集時に困らないようにしてほしいですね

And I want everyone not to be troubled when editing in a specific writerble language

Edited by Laclale on Jun 20th 2019 at 8:00:34 PM

Dear mod, why no chance to reply.

As for missing languages, I'd suggest English as the fallback language. We'd need a fallback anyway, otherwise most translations would end up pretty tiny wikis of their own. May look somewhat strange if you intend to also include translations for TV Tropes' general interface, but having English pages is better than having none.

I'd also suggest keeping the option to quickly switch between different language versions of the same page similar to how it is now. That could also facilitate creating new language versions of pages that are still missing.

Welcome to the Signature, Mon

So, after a couple of years, is this still going on?

Yo soy el futuro, luwawanu mu sadila kisalasala kio.

Given that the 2.0 update is still not in active development after all these years, I kinda tend to pretend that any kind of actual improvement to the translation process will not happen anytime soon.

It's not forgotten, but I wouldn't count on it happening any time in the near future.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Could there at least be easy links from the English Home Page to the homepages in other languages again, even though they aren't nearly as dolled up?

I mean, if you know where to look, you'll find them, but newbies don't even know they exist and assume TV Tropes is English only.

Welcome to the Signature, Mon