User talk:3D-Trish

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Welcome!

Hello, 3D-Trish, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} before the question on your talk page. Again, welcome!  NickelShoe (Talk) 12:04, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Translating on Wikipedia

Hi Trish, I've just read your question about doing translation with Wikipedia. I'll admit that I'm fairly new to this as well, but the first thing you'll need is an understanding of the Wikipedia formatting (i.e. the code that is shown when you edit a page). Without this, you can't really do anything on Wikipedia. The second thing to do is watch the list of requests for translation; once you see an article that you'd like to translate, then you have to edit the corresponding entry in the list by adding yourself as a translator. You can also update your progress as you work if you take some time with the translation; personally, I prefer to work intensively on one translation and am normally finished in a day or two so don't really bother with this, but it is useful for the owner of the page if the translation takes longer. Where progress and a translator are already shown, somebody is already working on the translation, which basically means that it's better to look for another page to translate. Once you've thus "claimed" a translation, you simply get to work on the text; I copy the texts from Wikipedia into Word and translate them there for ease of use. However, once you've translated the text, you must then also turn it into a proper Wikipedia entry using the formatting styles mentioned above. I try to adopt the formatting of the page that I have translated the text from, including pictures where these are available. All of this might sound a tad complicated if you've never done it before, but it's not too hard once you've done it once or twice (there are tutorials on Wikipedia on formatting, uploading pictures, etc. The best thing is to work through one or two of them and then look at what other people have done by clicking on "Edit" on just about any page. Remember however that key words such as "image" (to make a picture appear) may be different in different languages, but anything to do with making text larger, smaller, bold, italic, etc. is universal. Another thing to remember is that the existence of a given article on one language with a request to translate it is no guarantee of its quality; articles which do not name their sources are best left untranslated, as they'll only run into trouble on quality grounds, possibly meaning that all of the translator's work was for nothing. I'm afraid that I don't know anything about translations on WikiBooks; I doubt that they'd be interested in non-published translations. Hope that that was of some help! A jacksn 13:42, 14 July 2007 (UTC)