Creating Translations

I am assuming you are reading this because you’d like to submit a translation of an article?

If so - YAY! Thank you for contributing!

Creating a new translation of an existing article is fairly straightforward:

  1. Find the source file to translate.

  2. Create a new file in the same place, with the lang in the filename:
    original: translating.md
    translation: translating.fr.md

  3. Add the lang metadata to both the original and translation file:
    add lang: en to original
    add lang: fr to translation (example for French)

  4. To have different titles (translated title as well):

    • Add the same slug metadata to both files:
      add slug: some-slug-name to both original and translation file.
    • Then each file can have different titles.

Locate the Article You’ll Translate

Find the article source you want to translate. I will use this article you’re reading as an example. It can be found in the source at this location:

/content/about/meta/translating.md

Now create a new file in the same location, with a slightly different filename to indicate the new language. A handy convention to follow is to use the two-letter code for the new language in the filename. So to include a French version of this page, we will create a new file:

/content/about/meta/translating.fr.md

Modify/Add to Metadata

lang attribute

The metadata for this article looks like this (Markdown):

Title: Creating Translations
Date: 2015-08-27T10:18:03-05:00
Author: Pat David

There needs to be an addition of a lang attribute to both the original and new translation of the article. So this (english) version of the file must now get a lang attribute that identifies it as such:

translating.md:

Title: Creating Translations
Date: 2015-08-27T10:18:03-05:00
Author: Pat David
lang: en

Similarly, the new translation file must also get a lang attribute for the new language:

translating.fr.md

Title: Creating Translations
Date: 2015-08-27T10:18:03-05:00
Author: Pat David
lang: fr

slug attribute & different title

If you want to use a translated version of the article title, it will require one extra piece of metadata to work properly. (Hopefully temporarily - still working on this).

The addition of the slug attribute will let a different title be used in the translated version of the article. The actual value of the attribute is left to the author to choose, but it needs to match in all the translations of a page.

So the base english article will need this slug attribute added:

translating.md:

Title: Creating Translations
Date: 2015-08-27T10:18:03-05:00
Author: Pat David
lang: en
slug: creating-translations

Any other translation will need the exact same slug added as well:

translating.fr.md

Title: Creating Translations
Date: 2015-08-27T10:18:03-05:00
Author: Pat David
lang: fr
slug: creating-translations

Once that is done, the Title attribute can be different between the two files and they will still be marked as translations of each other:

translating.fr.md

Title: Créer Traductions
Date: 2015-08-27T10:18:03-05:00
Author: Pat David
lang: fr
slug: creating-translations