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)

Seems like it might be unweildy, or slow, but better than nothing and, really, what else can we do? It's not like we, the users of a Battlestar Galactica Wiki, are going to somehow inspire the world to use a unified language. ;) That would be linguistically boring, anyway. --Day 12:53, 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)

You've officially shown your sense of humor, Ricimer. :) I look forward to it! --Spencerian 19:39, 3 February 2006 (EST)

I, ah... I translated "Ozymandias" into Sindarin. I had to do some circumlocution and guess based on Quenya and Telerin words given in the Etymologies what a surviving Sindarin word might be (or "fix" a Noldorin word given), but I got the whole thing done. I think I have it on the net somewhere and if anyone cares, I'll track it down... Anyway, I don't think we could do much in Sindarin or Quenya, I agree. Maybe some of the shorter pages. Like the Viper one that's in German or whatever. I'm sure we could find a Sindarin word for Snake. Heh. Anyway, I know much too much about Sindarin for any normal person. --Day 02:40, 4 February 2006 (EST)

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that translation into a conlang might be entertaining :-) I actually came here looking to see if anyone was already doing Esperanto, which I know tolerably well and need an excuse to keep polished. Somehow, the idea of doing BSG pages in Klingon just seems So Very Wrong....--Uncle Mikey 13:33, 24 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)

Shouldn't this ultimately be up to the editors of the multilingual projects? --Peter Farago 16:53, 3 February 2006 (EST)

I think that if somebody read the German Wiki and watch BSG in German, it'll be no longer a spoiler once it aired (in German) anywhere in the world. It's like considering that he won't be interested in the English Wiki. What do you think? --Karoshi 17:57, 3 February 2006 (EST)

I'm inclined to agree, but I really just don't think it's any of my business, as a primarily non-German speaker. --Peter Farago 19:23, 3 February 2006 (EST)

Well, it is how I put it in the french Battlestar Wiki:Spoiler Policy. If there is any problem with that, just tell me! --Karoshi 11:05, 4 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)

I was about to start trying to make a character template of sorts for the Japanese version when I came upon a bit of an issue. As the BSG universe rank system isn't fully explained in the series yet with the possible exception of the officer ranks, I am wondering if it would be better to write the ranks in katakana (eg. コンマンダーアダマ) until a better method can be developed. Same issue with the Cylon models. Would ６番 be preferable to ナンバーシックス for the character of Number Six? A convention of sorts for naming in the Japanese wiki really needs to be developed before I figure we can go much further than the one (?) article we have now. Yashiko 18:48, 8 March 2006 (CST)

After doing some reading (very light reading, might I add), I would write the ranks in katakana, since that may very well be the easiest. -- Joe Beaudoin 19:41, 8 March 2006 (CST)

Ok. What about cylon model names (Number 6 and the like as more of the humano-cylon model numbers were recently revealed in the second season) since they are technically not proper names? Yashiko 14:05, 9 March 2006 (CST)

Questions

I was wondering, why not use babelfish [1]to translate the pages instead of using space on the server? The following is the site in spanish [2] --Quig 16:50, 3 February 2006 (EST)

In a perfect world babelfish would suffice, and all pages would be able to be translated to whichever language the client preferred to view. In the real world, the bablefish translation is less than ideal. I've actually stubbed out a couple of the pages with babelfish translations, and without fail a native speaker has had to make significant revisions to the translation. That does bring up a thought I had earlier... Would it be a good idea to stub out important pages that need to be translated with a babelfish of the english article? I imagine that a casual user would be far more likely to hack and slash to correct the atrocious grammatical/idiomatic errors that babelfish generates than to take the time to create a new article with the proper namespace, etc. I wouldn't suggest that this be done wholesale. One example would be babel-stubbing the articles linked to by 33/de:33, so that a German fan reading through after the first episode airs would encounter articles that had the proper german namespace, but just need a human eye for translation. A template could even be created that says "This page has been translated from the English page using babelfish. It needs to be looked over and corrected by a human that speaks the language." Just slap those on the babel-stubs, and if the translation is bad enough that the human needs to start from scratch, at least all the namespace and category information would be in place. --Steelviper 18:36, 3 February 2006 (EST)

Babelfish is not like its Hitchhiker's counterpart... unfortunately. However, Steelviper's idea is a good one. We could just generate pages through Babelfish, stick a tag -- such as {{babelfish}} -- and have a native speaker edit it. However, the ultimate goal is to get that human interaction that pages need. -- Joe Beaudoin 19:06, 3 February 2006 (EST)

I concur. Very good idea that allows almost any of us to get started on translating the simplier pages. At worst things may work out to the American equivalent of "Engrish" to native speakers. Humor in itself, I tink. To SV's template idea below, I think the tag needs to be created in multiples (it's small) and created by a native speaker so that the tag itself isn't confusing. --Spencerian 19:43, 3 February 2006 (EST)

Should there be a generic babelfish template, or a language specific one? I was just thinking that if we had categories for Babelfish (German),Babelfish (Spanish), etc, that a native speaker would have an easy list to work if they wanted to knock out a bunch of articles. I'm not sure how many people work like that, though... --Steelviper 19:35, 3 February 2006 (EST)

A foreign language user is just as capable of using babelfish to translate our English pages are we are. Doing so ourselves accomplishes nothing, other than creating the impression that the actual work of translation has already been done and thus does not require our continued attention. --Peter Farago 20:41, 3 February 2006 (EST)

I'll not argue that the babelfish is particularly useful most times (in fact, very little of what I put in the German pages that I babelfished remained). However, my idea was more a way of helping to spur translation to get done. I believe people are far more likely to edit an already existing William Adama/de:William Adama, than to create one. The babelfish page creator is adding more value in the creation of the page and the correct categorization. I could be wrong, so maybe we should do a small pilot (I wasn't thinking large scale anyway). --Steelviper 19:30, 4 February 2006 (EST)

Actually, I don't think that babelfishing is a very good idea. The translation engine is quite limited, and most of whatever is done has to be rewritten anyway (i.e., 33/es:33, after trying to read the first half of the page, and doing a quick draft in notepad, I decided I'd better retranslate the whole thing than correcting all those grammatical mistakes, reading it gets really confusing real fast, let alone working on it). Besides, some of the results of the engine are quite incorrect and unusable for categorization - or don't get translated at all:

"Miniseries" gets translatetd into spanish as "Serie en Miniatura". That translates back to english as "Minature Series", as in "Minture Model" - its roughly correct in concept, but no spanish speaker will understand that at first hand, the correct translation would be "Miniseries".

"Act of Contrition" gets translated as "Acto de Contrition". A literal translation would be "Acto de Contrición" (although the concept would be better translated as "Acto de Penitencia", "Act of Penitence", the actual religious act), but babelfish doesn't seem to know that the word Contrition extists at all.

What I propose is that a native speaker in the team create the page and translate a little bit, even just the first line in the article would work. The page would be there already and any other language speakers could continue to do as they please. --Lindem Herz 01:30, 8 February 2006 (GMT-5)

I guess that just goes to show that there's no substitute for native speakers. --Steelviper 10:38, 9 February 2006 (EST)

Babelfish is particularily attrocious going between Indo-Eurpopean and non-Indo-European languages. I do admit that I use a Japanese developed engine offered through the Japanese Excite website to check my grammar for writing emails in Japanese on occasion, but Babelfish offers nothing that doesn't have to be heavily edited to be of any use. Yashiko 18:33, 8 March 2006 (CST)

Which languages is BSG in?

Just wondering, which languages BSG (old or new) has been broadcast/released on DVD in (including subtitles and dubs)? Clearly those languages should be given priority as they would be far more useful. Of course, people who know two second languages are even rarer than those who know one, so perhaps having priorities wouldn't make much difference anyway... --Undc23 19:07, 3 February 2006 (EST)

It has been my observation that translations depend on where the DVD has been released. (For instance, in America, many DVDs have either Spanish audio tracks or subtitles, even both.) -- Joe Beaudoin 19:09, 3 February 2006 (EST)

Based on the information on Wikipedia:Battlestar Galactica (2004 television series)#First-run and a little bit of googling, non-english versions of BSG have aired in the languages listed below. --Peter Farago 21:23, 3 February 2006 (EST)

Dutch

In the Netherlands: Veronica TV: site, forum.

Finnish

Nelonen: site.

German

RTL II: site. (n.b. RTL-II is a broadcast channel in Germany, and available as a cable channel in Austria and Switzerland)

Spanish

In Spain: Calle 13: site, forum.

In Latin America: TNT Latin America: site (Mexico), TNT site (Argentina), site (Latin America).

Portugese

In Brazil: TNT Latin America: site.

Localizing Interwiki links

For links to wikipedia, we're going to need interwiki namespaces for the various languages that we're translating content into. --Peter Farago 17:46, 5 February 2006 (EST)

The best idea is imho this syntax: [[Wikipedia:de:Battlestar Galactica]] --$traight-$hoota 07:43, 6 February 2006 (EST)

Ah. That works nicely. --Peter Farago 10:48, 6 February 2006 (EST)

Internal links

Should internal links in translated articles in general refeer to the english article or to the – probably not yet translated – articel in the same language? I think they should be linked to existing articles in english, but when an article is translated every link must be changed from the english to the german article. In {{Episode List (es)}} the links refeer to the non-existing spanish articles, in {{Episode List (de)}} to the english articles. --$traight-$hoota 07:37, 6 February 2006 (EST)

Good question. I would suggest to link to the english article as long there is no translation available. In episode listings/guides on the other hand I think it's better to link to the not yet existing translated version to avoid spoilers (and encourage translation). --Astfgl 13:56, 06 February 2006 (CET)

I think this might be a wonderful time for the use of redirects. If, for example, William Adama/es:William Adama has yet to be translated (I know this one's in progress, but I didn't want to create a dead link), then have it redirect to William Adama. Then, when someone translates Bill's page into Spanish, they will simply replace the redirect and all the links from other Spanish pages will be "fixed" automatically. What do others think of this? --Day 03:47, 8 February 2006 (EST) ~~(Post Script: Isn't there a template somwhere that lets us link to a Template page without triggering the "Templates used on this page" thing?)~~

That's a great idea. --Astfgl 14:42, 8 February 2006 (CET)

Translation/Spoiler Difficulties

I like the flowing, narrative style of this article, but it struck me as a beast to translate into German. Not from the content (as far as I am aware), but from the way all the "Spoiler" information is interspersed throughout. The citations make it a lot easier to determine what came from where, but when trying to come up with Pre-33 content I couldn't find much. In order to translate some of these character pages it strikes me that either somebody will have to subject themselves heavily to spoilers to pull the content, or contributors from those languages will have to essentially start from scratch. The only alternative (that just occured to me) would be to have an English speaker who has seen up through the present crop out all the "non-spoiler info" and deposit it at the future translation site. This is essentially what I did with the German Helo article (except that I also did my best to run the non-spoiler info through Babelfish, which sometimes does more harm than good). --Steelviper 12:31, 6 February 2006 (EST)

It might be best to have an introductory paragraphy that describes the "non-spoilerific" content for Adama, then paste a spoiler warning and go into a narrative style after said warning. -- Kosh 23:03, 7 February 2006 (EST)

Translation Project Recruiting

The general rule with wiki's is usually "The more, the merrier." The more people that come by increase the number of potential contributors, and the number of eyes to proofread and edit contributions. The Merovengian has occassionally extolled the virtues of this site on scifi.com's message board. I was wondering if some of our native speakers might take on a "homework assignment" of posting a message about this site on some of the native language boards. I've been in email contact with Pia of BattlestarFanClub.de, and they were fine with us posting a message about this site. (I just don't speak ANY German.) The sooner we get more pages translated, the sooner we can get the language-specific portals set up (and that would be really cool). --Steelviper 10:38, 9 February 2006 (EST)

I'm the only one translating in french so far! But, for a week I tried to recruit some of my friends, but Battlestar didn't air in french here yet (Québec, Can). So I tried with some french European people/board. So far, nobody that I spoke speak/understand english. So nobody want to translate! But, I think some of them want to contribute and create article. So if I translate an episode (33), a character and a ship (for exemple); they might come and create Original French Article. Is this sound like a good idea? --Karoshi 12:07, 9 February 2006 (EST)

I know how you feel! I was alone in translating ANYTHING there for a while. Fortunately others have stepped in and cleaned up the mess I made when I first started. As for creating articles natively in a foreign language... as long as it's based on the canon I don't see a major problem with it. The only thing we want to watch out for is to make sure that we are consistent with the information. It would be bad if factual information was contradicted between language versions of the articles. However, writing it originally in the native language could allow it to flow a lot more naturally and read better for the native speakers (since translating english word for word can lead to awkward translations). That's my take anyway. --Steelviper 10:14, 10 February 2006 (EST)

Letting everyone know...

Given the amount of articles that are completed for the Spanish version of the Wiki, I have gone ahead and started the Spanish version of Battlestar Wiki.

The URL is: http://www.battlestarwiki.org/es/w

I began moving an article over there, to see if everything worked all right. It has. I'll continue with it tomorrow.

Here are a few things to know:

The English and Spanish wikis have a universal sign on. Therefore the sign on you use on the English wiki is the same as it is on the Spanish one. Makes things easier.
1. A minor side effect, however, is that the Wikis may appear to have the same language i18ns. That is because users who signed up on the English BSGWiki have the English language as default. This can be changed in the preferences, which you may access on the top right hand corner under the "Preferences" link.
Images are also shared. Therefore images have the same names on both languages. This eliminates the need to upload the image for use on multiple wikis.
For Admins: Rather than copy and paste an article from EN wiki to ES wiki, you should really use the Special:Export function. Make sure that you deselect the checkbox stating to copy the current version of the article, so that the entire edit histories are preserved. Save the exported version to your computer as an xml file, then go to the ES wiki and click on the Special pages link, then to Import pages. Unfortunately only admins have this priviledge (although anyone can export pages from wikis).

Since the Spanish wiki is now online, people should bring all translated articles over to there, instead of leaving them on this Wiki.

I'll do more later on today. Time for me to go to bed, however. -- Joe Beaudoin 00:35, 6 March 2006 (CST)

That's great news! Are we going to try to translate the main page entirely (even though we're focusing on the RDM stuff)? Or we could just give them a template layout similar to the current main page and let them add what content makes sense for their portal for now? Exciting stuff. I'll play with the import/export process. It sounds scary, but I guess worst case I can clean up my mess (delete). As the each language grows enough to merit its own namespace version, we may want to consider identifying at least one native-language admin. That might make the import/export process smoother, and help ensure that there is someone patrolling the recent changes that can recognize non-blatant vandalism. --Steelviper 07:14, 6 March 2006 (CST)

Quick update. It turns out I'm not a sysop over there anyway, so I guess I won't be playing with the import/export yet. That does seem to mean that it would be possible to have "localized" sysop privs (though honestly if you're trusted for one you would probably be trusted for all). --Steelviper 07:44, 6 March 2006 (CST)

You should be able to play with it now. -- Joe Beaudoin 10:22, 6 March 2006 (CST)

How do you go about "de-anglification" of the links? This first time I went through by hand and stripped out anything in links prior to the : in es:, leaving only the eventual spanish location (hopefully). If this is the process, then I might write a quick script/macro that doest that automagically, because otherwise I'd probably risk space madness. --Steelviper 13:36, 6 March 2006 (CST)