whonix.org wiki translation / mediawiki extension translate - technical discussion

Good day,

my name is Ego, I’m 17 years old, currently attending a Gymnasium in Austria and a general enthusiast of your project.

Now, since I speak both English, as well as German rather fluidly and have some “rudimentary” knowledge of current technology, I thought it would maybe be a good idea to help you by translating the Wiki to German. However, I’ve had a few starting issues in doing so.

My main problem would be, that even though I’ve been trying to understand the MLEB’s basic inner workings, I’m hardly able to get any of my translations even through to the “approving-stage”. I can absolutely understand, that you may not simply let any new kid change the wiki, for obvious reasons and thus have a review based system in place. However, no matter what I try, once I’ve written my translation and clicked on the “Save translation” button, a big yellow box appears, stating “Saving the translation failed: You don’t have permission to create new pages”. Now, even though I’ve actually worked on a few wiki’s before, I’m unable to see, whether this means, that my translation got send to someone who is able to review it. It would be nice, if someone could maybe explain to me, whether the mistake is on my behalf…

The second issue I’ve noticed may (again) be a simple result of my stupidity. Currently, there seems to be no way of translating any other page then the homepage itself. I would really enjoy working on these as well, since, to completely understand how Whonix works and what is necessary to use it safely, such information should be available in as many languages as possible. So, if I’m simply incapable of finding the correct button to translate other “wiki pages” into German, I would be more than thankful, if someone could point out what I’m doing wrong. And if this is currently not possible, I would be thrilled to see the possibility of translating the entire wiki added.

Thank you very much, for helping me, have a nice day and carpe noctem,

Ego

Hi! Thanks for your interest! The issue is, no one of the current Whonix team has figured that out either nor will get to that anytime soon.

The problem is, we still do not have a translations coordinator. See:

Whonix Project looking for Translations Coordinator

As long as this is the case, we cannot accept translations.

Good day,

thank you for answering on such short notice and explaining the situation to me. I initially presumed that a language coordinator was already found, due to the simply size of the community. May I ask, would the language coordinator be responsible for translations in more than one language? Because, if the problem would really lie in finding someone for coordination and it would be possible, to focus on one language, I would be willing to take this “burden” and “coordinate” the translations into German, because I feel, that a lot of people have a problem when it comes to understanding how the TOR-Project or Whonix work and presenting an explanation in a language not native to them, doesn’t help much.

So, to summarize, if there is the necessity, I would be willing to take my part, though, I wouldn’t be mad at you, if you’d decline the offer,

Ego

No. Any kind of contribution would be appreciated. A small realistic step forward is better than a big unrealistic one.

Good day,

well, I would definitely be willing to take such a step forward, to support the project, however, I really have a problem getting my head around why the language extension is as temperamental as it is. As far as I’ve understood the documentation, the language selector tag would have to be manually placed on pretty much every page of the wiki, as stated here: Extension:LanguageSelector - MediaWiki Now, the thing is, that of course, this hasn’t been applied to all pages, that would be “over kill” considering the feature is currently not really in use. However, what I couldn’t get my head around was, why the selector shows German on some instances and on other sites, the language is completely left out. I’m presuming the same is the case for other languages. This however is strange because, which languages are getting presented on the selector is, as far as I can tell, configured inside a solitary file, which should enforce the rules for the entire wiki… This whole thing gets even more obscure, when looking at the Whonix-Download-Page. Visit it in its original, English form and you may find a language “selection field”, not completely based on the selector, but rather an ordinary html link, which after examining the code of the page, seems to be a direct copy of how the code would look like, when generated by the extension. If I then click on one of the languages, a part from English, I do not only get a (partially) translated page, but also one, which shows the classic language selector, with its nice green box.

Now, the second thing, getting the “Translate this page” box on the respective pages of the wiki, should be doable, simply by wrapping the entire content of a respective page in the tag, something which should be doable by myself.

So, in conclusion: Maybe I’m simply misunderstanding the basic principle of the selector-tag. Maybe there is even the need for manually marking the pages to show certain languages. I’ll read deeper into this, however, the documentation on the plug-in sadly is not as extensive as I would wish it to be. If I’ve found a proper way to really work with the translation system, I’ll definitely try to phrase an easy guide for others and post it on here.

Until then however, I say:

Carpe noctem,

Ego

I guess you found already the documentation.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Language_Extension_Bundle
May or may not be helpful.

The extension also has an IRC support. Please consider asking there. They’re usually around and helpful.

http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=mediawiki-i18n

irc.freenode.net #mediawiki-i18n

Hello again,

so after attempting this on other wikis and chatting with a few nice guys in mediawikis IRC channel, I still can’t get behind this. The problem is, that the tag, which is vital for the entire system, doesn’t work everywhere. On the homepage for example, everything works swimmingly, which you can test yourself by removing and adding said tag and viewing at what happens in the preview. If the tag is removed, the language selector (the box where you see all the languages) gets removed as well and if you add again, the box reappears. However, if this is done anywhere else, like for example on this site: Onion Services - Whonix the box doesn’t appear. This however goes against the basic principle of the translation plugin, as far as I got told. If you for example copy the text of a page, where it works (like the homepage) into one, where it doesn’t (like the one about Hidden Services) as got recommended to me the tag DOESN’T have any impact as well, which is why I was able to exclude the possibility of me simply typing wrongly or making some other arbitrary mistake.

According to some guys from mediawiki, this can mean either two things:

1.) Someone has manually excluded a few sites via a configuration file. Sadly, I can’t confirm this.

2.) The installation went “wrong”.

The thing is, that, as far as I got told and as far as I was able to find out, the system doesn’t work the way it should on the whonix wiki. Which is a shame because having such information as accessible as possible is vital in my perspective.

Thank you for reading, if you have an idea or are able to control, whether some arbitrary config-file is set to the wrong parameters, I would be very thankful to hear from you and have a nice day,

Ego

Hey Ego!

Thanks for your interest, and your nice, verbose posts.

First off, I upgraded our installation of the MLEB, so that’s always a good thing.

Second, the Translate extension is a little weird in the way it operates. Based on this tutorial:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Translate/Page_translation_example

You have to first mark a page for translation, save it, and then it will be ready for translations. Once translations (however partial they may be) have been made, they should appear in the bar.

I don’t think the extension is very intuitive at all, but it’s pretty much the best option we have, so we make do. I’m sure upstream wouldn’t mind suggestions if you have any! :slight_smile:

Feel free to do testing and make changes in the sandbox:

https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Test:sandbox

I’ll keep an eye on this thread if you have more questions.

Good day,

without wanting to sound like I’m “whining”, I have to say, that this extension is driving me nuts. After the sandbox got approved for translation (the fact that this has to apparently be done separately already makes the already infuriatingly hard process of translating something to a language with strong phonetic and grammatical differences even longer and seems unnecessary, providing that even the translations need to be reviewed by someone) I made myself to work and tried translating the few lines on there. However, after finishing this task, and clicking on the “translated tab” in the upper bar, to look at what I’ve done, the page told me that I would have unsaved translations and asked me, whether I still wanted to progress. Then I noticed that everything, I had translated was covered by a yellow box. Upon clicking on it, I got the following explanation for the strange behavior of the extension: “Saving the translation failed: You don’t have permission to create new pages” Now, this is rich. Not only is it now necessary to have someone with extended permissions to “authorize the page for translation” by hand, as well as someone who is able to preview the translations, now there is the necessity for someone who may create pages to do so for each and every language which might need a own wiki page in the future. Now, don’t get me wrong, I definitely can see, why the permission to create new pages isn’t granted to everyone (I’d go so far as to say it should be granted to as few as possible, to keep things manageable), whoever in case of translation the system in place only partially makes sense. I would have assumed that there was the possibility of translating a page, then putting it up for review and if it’s acceptable, the page gets both created and filled with the translated text at the same time. Under these circumstances, the extension would also make sense. However, as far as I can tell at the moment, the process would look like this:

Someone creates a page in English → Someone wants to translate it → Adds tags necessary for doing so → Asks someone with permission to activate translations → If someone wants to translate the page to german, someone with permission needs to create a page for this by hand, if someone wants to translate the page to french, it has to be manually created, etc. → Now and only now, may he translate the page → The page gets, if the user is rather new, put out for review → If the quality is acceptable, the translation gets incorporated

Now, the extension only partially makes sense if this really is the case. I mean, if this truly is correct, it would probably be easier to simply create a separate “whonix.de” or “whonix.fr” and translate the wiki in its entirety. However, to be honest, I refuse to believe, that this is the case, which is why I’ll spend the “mediawiki guys” another visit via IRC.

Have a nice day, in vino veritas and good night,

Ego

We limited the new page creation right, because new page creation is the top source of spam. This allows us to keep anonymous edits allowed. Those fly by edits have shown to be useful. However, these spam protection measures conflict with easy translation. The translation manager and translators require necessary user rights to be able to work.

Long story short, I just now added these rights to your account. Should work now. Please try again.

Good day,

now, first of all for giving me that permission. Secondly, the problems seem to have no end because, after translating the entire homepage, something you may see for yourself here: Whonix - Overview , I noticed, that not only are certain parts not “translatable”, but that some things don’t work at all. What I mean by that is the following:

When I translate the site, I have to use the following page: https://www.whonix.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Translate&group=page-Main+Page&action=page&filter=&language=de On it, I have this nice interface, which lets me translate most of the written text. However, some things like for example the “Whonix has been rated 5/5 stars by users of sourceforge.net on 2014-03-12” part of the page simply do not show up. This in turn means, that I am unable of translating such parts. What is however far worse is that on my newly translated page the download box doesn’t appear. At first I though I had made a mistake so I checked the entire translation, however, there is no way of editing it. The same is the case for a few other things on the page, like for example the “Official Website” part.

At first I thought of this as mildly annoying, I mean, I could still edit the page manually, right? Wrong! Translated pages can’t be edited. I even was able to go to the source of the translate homepage, simply by adding /de to Main_Page in the URL. Now, on there, the following nice line is written:

You do not have permission to edit this page, for the following reason:

This page cannot be updated manually. This page is a translation of the page Main Page and the translation can be updated using the translation tool.

You can see for yourself, here is the link: Editing Main Page/de - Whonix

Now, translating the page is now possible for me, however, the translation tool seems to have a problem with certain parts of code. Now, let me tell you, even though I’m still rather young, I’ve already seen all kinds of crazy software, however this is takes the cake, when it comes to obscurity. I’ll ask on the IRC of mediawiki again, why the translation tool not only ignores certain parts of the page, but then goes so far as to lock down the possibility to manually edit them in.

Have a nice day,

Ego

That part can likely not be translated, because it’s not wrapped into . The main page is one of the more difficult pages to translate. I would advice to start with some easier one, that does not have existing tags to avoid legacy and complexity at start.

The pages ending /en doesn’t make sense.

Can you try to find out how to get rid of https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Starting_Whonix/en please?

I think that’s actually core to how the Translate extension works. Translated pages are basically shells that load the selected language. Without the /en page, I don’t think we would have the English content available anymore…

Good day,

Sorry for being absent for a few days now, but I was doing some rather extensive research for a scientific report I need to write in order to pass the regional equivalent of what most know as the “A-levels”. However, I’ve still occasionally found some time to deduce how the translation extension works properly. I’ve found out the following:

1.) The way the translation and language tags need to be set apparently has changed between the time someone first introduced them to the Whonix-Wiki and now. What I could find out was that, just like you may see on the front page, earlier builds/versions of the extensions needed a manual separation of the translatable area. What I mean by this is, that it was necessary, to manually put the tags between each and every part of the text to translate it. However, fortunately, this has changed some time ago. Now, the tags only need to be set ONCE at the top and bottom of a page, as you may see here: Permission error - Whonix

The extension then automatically separates what is necessary for translation. This also solves the problem I had with the front-page, that things like the “download box” couldn’t be translated, as you may see here: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Comparison_of_different_Whonix_variants/de Everything in the box was easily translatable.

So we should simply do the same for the front-page and the problem is solved, right? To be honest, I couldn’t find out, whether this would simply allow editing the entire homepage and keep all the current translation by other people (which would be great) or not. If the later is the case, such a change would have to be organised on an extremely exact level, as to not loose anything. Sadly, currently, as you may see for example here: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Main_Page/pl on the polish version, every language suffers from the problems in regard to the language tags.

2.) Regarding the /en thing, I have a theory. The thing is, that this has nothing to do with how the extension works, after all, sites translated by me or the front-page never suffered from this problem, but rather, that someone translated the page to English. You can easily deduce it by the words:

This page is a translated version of the page Starting Whonix and the translation is 100% complete.

Which are on the page you’ve linked, even when looking at the English version. That is the key to the problem. Furthermore, if you just visit: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Starting_Whonix/ without the /en at the end, you find an empty page. Now, I can’t read the logs for the “translated version” (or my mental capacity is insufficient for doing so) though I can definitely tell that no one ever wrote anything on the original (without /en) version.

3.) Just a small question: To keep people from having problems with this extension, I would be more than willing to write a short guide on the ins and outs, if that is wanted. Furthermore, I would like to ask, whether it is OK if I mark some of the pages for translation, which are currently in queue for doing so? Because, as stated before, being even able to use the extension on a new page, is already a pretty hard endeavour. This would allow people to already put in what they believe to be a proper translation, however, as far as I could understand the exstension, this doesn’t allow anyone to create a new page. What they would put in would get to review and after that, if the quality holds up, it would be activated.

4.) Now, last but not least, a question which, to keep the translations homogeneous, needs to be discussed: Translate the names of links or keep them in English. And, if the former is the case, should a (English) be added, so that readers may know that the page is in a different language? Also, is using a translated version of a page (if available) a good idea or not? Translations, and here comes a moment of sincerity, are sadly always to a certain degree different in their message, when compared to the original (just look at the Snowden Interview by the ARD last year). So that should also be considered.

Have a nice day,

Ego

1.) The way the translation and language tags need to be set apparently has changed between the time someone first introduced them to the Whonix-Wiki and now. What I could find out was that, just like you may see on the front page, earlier builds/versions of the extensions needed a manual separation of the translatable area. What I mean by this is, that it was necessary, to manually put the tags between each and every part of the text to translate it. However, fortunately, this has changed some time ago. Now, the tags only need to be set ONCE at the top and bottom of a page, as you may see here: https://www.whonix.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_different_Whonix_variants&action=edit
Not sure I understand. You mean you just need a single ...? That's always been like this. Sometime it's useful to use multiple of them to exclude non-translateable stuff.
So we should simply do the same for the front-page and the problem is solved, right?
At your discretion. (Nach Deinem Ermessen.)
2.) Regarding the /en thing, I have a theory. The thing is, that this has nothing to do with how the extension works, after all, sites translated by me or the front-page never suffered from this problem, but rather, that someone translated the page to English. You can easily deduce it by the words:
This page is a translated version of the page Starting Whonix and the translation is 100% complete.

Which are on the page you’ve linked, even when looking at the English version. That is the key to the problem. Furthermore, if you just visit: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Starting_Whonix/ without the /en at the end, you find an empty page. Now, I can’t read the logs for the “translated version” (or my mental capacity is insufficient for doing so) though I can definitely tell that no one ever wrote anything on the original (without /en) version.


Yeah. Someone by mistake created the English translation. Nevermind. Just need to figure out how to delete it. I guess it’s possible.

3.) Just a small question: To keep people from having problems with this extension, I would be more than willing to write a short guide
Sure thing. Whatever helps is welcome.
Furthermore, I would like to ask, whether it is OK if I mark some of the pages for translation, which are currently in queue for doing so?
Sure.
4.) Now, last but not least, a question which, to keep the translations homogeneous, needs to be discussed: Translate the names of links or keep them in English. And, if the former is the case, should a (English) be added, so that readers may know that the page is in a different language? Also, is using a translated version of a page (if available) a good idea or not? Translations, and here comes a moment of sincerity, are sadly always to a certain degree different in their message, when compared to the original (just look at the Snowden Interview by the ARD last year). So that should also be considered.
Also up to your discretion. You can translate the names of the links. Seems more intuitive? If they still end up on an English page, hm bad. Life is tough. A warning "there will be no translated page of that link available" is perhaps a missing feature in the extension that cannot be worked around without messing up.

Please change:
TOR → Tor
(How can we help? | Tor Project | Support)

Sent you an e-mail, Ego. (The one registered with this forum. Not sure it works.)

Good day,

thank you for highlighting that error, I honestly wasn’t aware of “Tor” being written in that manner, when writing about it in other languages as well, which is why I simply assumed it would be best written in capitol letters, since it isn’t a “real” composita compared to what Latin and German have. Anyway, this really makes me feel rather dumb, especially with them stating: “we can usually spot people who haven’t read any of our website”… I’ll correct this in all of my translations immediately and add a warning to my “guide to translation”, so nobody makes this mistake again.

Furthermore, the mail address used for registering in the wiki is correct and working, however, I usually only check whether I’ve received something once a week.

Have a nice day and thank you,

Ego

Didn’t read that link that throughly. Ah. Sorry. Didn’t want to make you feel dumb. Just wanted to backup my statement. Kinda like “it’s not just my opinion, it’s what they ask for”.

Good day,

no hard feelings, was meant in a more humorous way anyway.

Have a nice day,

Ego