Battlestar Wiki talk:Translation Project

Area of Focus

Is this primarily going to be focues on the RDM content (initially)? Or EVERYTHING (TOS, 1980, etc)? What happens when article names would be translated (la flota, or la flota colonial for "the fleet" (or "the colonial fleet")). Do you create the subpage of the original article with the proposed translated name, or with the original name? (The Fleet/es:The Fleet or The Fleet/es:La Flota). I might be interested in doing some rudimentary Spanish translations, although my limited experience (4 years of high school spanish, plus a year of latin) would likely render my translations lacking in advanced syntax or correctness on the idiom front. It might be good if somebody identified a group of core articles to attempt for each language, at least as a starting point. The Character template (the one at the bottom with all the people in it, not that character data template) and some specific episode guides might be a good starting point? Would we try to begin at the beginning (season 1, episode 1), or try to start with the current stuff (then work the backlog later). I guess I'm asking more questions than I'm answering, but it sounds like a neat idea. --Steelviper 14:09, 20 January 2006 (EST)

*cricket sounds* Update: I decided to focus on Season 1 of RDM, especially on the episode summaries. I'm still undecided as to whether the analysis should be translated (in which case something will likely be "lost in translation" or if the analysis should be written by native speakers. Until somebody starts to ruthlessly ridicule my work I'll probably continue slowly working through season 1's summaries (probably hitting it harder once I'm done with the (English) TOS episode summaries). --Steelviper 16:21, 30 January 2006 (EST)

I would focus on RDM content, seeing as most people would be looking for content on "the new show" before looking for the "old stuff". -- Joe Beaudoin 16:33, 30 January 2006 (EST)

So THAT'S what TOS stands for (The "Old Stuff"). Yeah, looking at the Popular Pages special seems to show a definite preference towards the new show. I guess theoretically the priority would be translating the most recent episode summary, but it might be odd for the episode summaries to start midway through Season 2. Rather than creating a backlog that would have to be caught up I started at the beginning (minus the mini-series). I may have to see if I can find any Spanish speaking BSG (RDM) forums and point them this way. It seems like wiki's work best when numbers are on your side. --Steelviper 16:42, 30 January 2006 (EST)

Well... that too. :-) Good idea. Now if anyone spoke German, we can get some of the webmasters to the German BSG sites to post a note or three saying that we are looking for English-to-German translations of our content. -- Joe Beaudoin 17:02, 30 January 2006 (EST)

I fired an email (in English) to the contacts at battlestarfanclub.de. I cc'd you, so you should see it soon. I gambled that they could speak some English, and if not hopefully Babelfish is kind to me... --Steelviper 17:37, 30 January 2006 (EST)

Wonderful! Thank you! -- Joe Beaudoin 21:21, 30 January 2006 (EST)

Was, sprechen Sie Deutsch nicht? --Talos 22:13, 30 January 2006 (EST)

Nein! (Pssst! Joe! We caught one! Put him to work!) --Steelviper 22:39, 30 January 2006 (EST)

By your command. -- Joe Beaudoin 23:02, 30 January 2006 (EST)

Steelviper ask something and nobody answer it. It's about the page name: Do you create the subpage of the original article with the proposed translated name, or with the original name? (The Fleet/es:The Fleet or The Fleet/es:La Flota). The exemple with William Adama/de:William Adama is a bad one because we, usualy, don't translate names. (I'm here for 24 hours and I already tell you what is good or bad, who am I to do this???) I already know the Official french tittle for the first ≈25 episodes and I think it would be a good idea to use it. Or maybe you want me to translate the tittle! --Karoshi 11:44, 2 February 2006 (EST)

For the time being I've been keeping the english name for the translated subpage, but using (my best approximation of) the translated name in the translated text if I'm linking to it. I'd like Joe to weigh in on this, as I'm not sure of the implementation details of the "switchover" goes when we have enough content. There may be some automation to it that would require particular naming conventions. However, in the final product it would make sense for the article names to be in the native language and not english. --Steelviper 11:49, 2 February 2006 (EST)

The Adama example is a bad example; my fault. Obviously, the name of the article should be translated in the appropriate language -- ex: The Fleet/es:La Flota. I'll write up something later on how I plan to move the articles once there is enough content for the switchover. I don't have the time to go through it now, unfortunately. -- Joe Beaudoin 11:54, 2 February 2006 (EST)

Probably a Good Idea

I just saw that there's a translation of Standards and Conventions going on. That's probably a very good place to start off. That way, people who speak only, say, French, can still create content that's uniform with other languages and pages, etc. Now, we may get into some trickey business when some issue comes up for discussion on the Spanish S&C Talk and all of us veterans would like to chime in, but don't speak Spanish... However, I think that would be a reletively good problem to have. --Day 16:03, 2 February 2006 (EST)

So let the main discussion take place on the english discussion pages. Users who speak other languages should also write on the english discussion pages. if they aren't good in english others might help them to translate their posts. --$traight-$hoota 07:12, 3 February 2006 (EST)

Waste of Time(tm)

So... I am very bad at Latin and I was thinking that would be a particularly useless language to translate the Wiki into. Then I thought, "Oh no. No... Sindarin would be more useless. But probably also more fun." So, does anyone have any interest at all (my personal level is actually rather low, I'm just throwing this out there for boos and hisses and chuckles) in translating pages into Sindarin or Quenya, maybe some Klingon or Esperanto. I think anything we actually did in these tongues would have to be tagged as a silly page, but, well, it might serve as a nice break from changing "Baltar, Gaius" to "Gauis Baltar" or something. ;) --Day 04:30, 1 February 2006 (EST)

You can't really appreciate the Toaster article except in the native Klingon. Damn you for getting me to think about that... --Spencerian 15:16, 1 February 2006 (EST)

I possess all of the Klingon language (no'Hol) official Okuda stuff, and I have access to a great deal of Sindarin and Quenya stuff. However, I don't have a lot of time to translate all of this and probably will only take a try at it this summer. Further, not all of Quenya and Sindarin "survives"; while Klingon has words for modern warfare (ships, guns, etc) Quenya and Sindarin mostly cover medieval warfare, love poetry, art, etc. Certain conversations are actually impossible in standard Sindaran or Quenya. *AS A JOKE* I will eventually try to translate one or two articles into Sindarin and Quenya, *in a pidgin fashion*.--Ricimer 14:41, 2 February 2006 (EST)

Spoiler Policy

I didn't realize that BSG (RDM) was JUST now starting to air in Germany. The timing of this project couldn't have been better! That being said, our newest German contributor raised an interesting issue. The 33 episode guide is currently a spoiler (for German fans, anyway). Should the "Spoiler Warning" template get a German makeover and start to get used like the English speaking pages? That would also potentially limit the scope of the translation work on some of the characters, etc., as theoretically you would only want to translate as far as the series had progressed (or wrap the rest in a (German-translated) spoiler template). Also, when will this start airing in Spanish-speaking countries? The same issue might arise for that subset of pages as well. Mostly, though, I'm just psyched to see translation work going on for two different languages at the same time! I still haven't heard anything back from Pia, but I did add the battlestarfanclub.de link to the front in case they end up wanting to swap links. --Steelviper 10:29, 2 February 2006 (EST)

The Canadians have, somehow, the same problème. Next saturday (February 4) we'll see "Fragged". "Pegasus" is set for march 25! And SciFi-France just aired "Fragged" (if my infos is correct...) And in french (Canada), the miniserie will first air February 11. But I don't think we need a "Spoiler Warning" on every pages. The spoiler template on the translated pages might be a good idea. Or a "Spoiler policy" on the language translated' "Main Page". I hope I'm clear... --Karoshi 11:18, 2 February 2006 (EST)

Other languages should also have the benefit of our spoiler policy. Since contributors have started translating other templates already, let's go ahead and translate the applicable templates and policy. -- Joe Beaudoin 11:32, 2 February 2006 (EST)

Well, when we made the spoiler policy, we decided that something was no longer a spoiler once it aired anywhere. At the time that meant, mostly, whether it was US-first or UK-first. So, technically, Quebec doesn't any and different spoilers than does Utah. However, I'd not be opposed to make a, ah, Multi-Linguial Amendment or whatever to the Spoiler Policy so that Quebec could have diffferent spoilers from Utah. Just thought I'd mention that the current policy covers our current situation, just maybe not how we'd like it to. --Day 12:52, 3 February 2006 (EST)

Categories

How are translated articles categorized? Up till now I had been giving them the same categories as their english counterparts. This will cause them to show up in the category listings (which is kind of odd, but keeps them a bit more visible). Should we continue with this, or create language-spaced categories to sort them into instead? (I'm not sure if language-space is a real term, but we're in unfamiliar waters here.) --Steelviper 13:41, 2 February 2006 (EST)

Standards and Conventions

Some s&c about spelling etc. are different in german. should these conventions be modified for german language or should they be left out to be discussed about on the german discussion page? --$traight-$hoota 07:24, 3 February 2006 (EST)

I would discuss them first. (If anything, it gives us English speaking folks insight on how other language wikis would go about implementing any S&Cs.) -- Joe Beaudoin 07:42, 3 February 2006 (EST)