About the translations & hints for translators
The translations of the CSS pages, like most others on the W3C
Web site, are done by volunteers. Some are of high
quality, others less. They are likely to be somewhat out of date
with respect to the original, English pages.
If you're looking for translations of technical
specifications, the best place to look is the database of translations. Translations of other pages, like this one, which may change from
time to time, are generally linked directly from the English page.
If you notice errors in any of the pages, please, let us know!
A big thanks to all the translators!
Location of translations
We prefer to host
translations of the CSS-related pages on the W3C site. That way, we
can update the common parts (navigation menu, logo, etc.) when
needed.
In fact, if you are going to translate one of the CSS pages, we
would like to ask you to translate not the whole page, but a
stripped-down version that contains just the text to
translate. And then send the translation back to us.
For example: Say you are going to translate the Learning CSS page. If you look in the source of that page,
you will see a comment near the top that says: Editors &
translators, please, edit learning.en.tmpl. That means that
you can find the stripped-down version by replacing the last part
of the URL with learning.en.tmpl. The URL of the page is
something like http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/learning and
thus you can download the stripped-down version from the http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/learning.en.tmpl URL.
(If you prefer to translate a PO/POT file instead of an HTML
file, ask us and we'll send you the POT version.)
If you are the first person to translate into a
certain language, we will also ask you separately to translate a
number of short sentences that occur in the common parts of all
pages.
Language mark-up
All text in Web
pages should normally be marked up with the name of the language in
which it is written. For pages that use the W3C style sheets it is
even more important, because some of the style rules are
language-dependent.
As a minimum, pages should have a line like this at the top,
just after the ‘doctype’ line:
<html lang="xy">
where ‘xy’ must be replaced by the 2- or 3-letter language ‘subtag’ for your language. (The link
goes to the IANA Registry, which is a simple, but long text file.
If you have a browser with JavaScript, you can also try Richard
Ishida's language
subtag lookup app, which uses JavaScript to search in that
text.)
If you're not sure which is the right 2- or 3-letter code, try
reading Choosing a Language Tag.
The translated text should in general have the same mark-up
(tags) as the original, although it may be necessary to change the
mark-up inside sentences, because word order is different between
different languages.
Comments and class=notranslate
Several HTML comments in the source (‘<!-- include… -->’)
are there to help with the synchronization of the original and the
translations. Please, leave them as they are.
Also, there are pieces of text that are marked-up with a
‘class=notranslate’ because I believe those do not need to be
translated. I may be wrong, of course. Please, use your own
judgement.
Several dates are marked-up as <span
class=updated>YYYY-MM-DD</span>. Please, leave
those as they are. They are used, e.g., to generate the Atom/RSS
feeds.
(I may at some point decide to put the dates in a TITLE
attribute, or switch to HTML5, which has a special element for dates…)
Translating into right-to-left languages (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.)
Most translations have the same mark-up as the original and only
the content is different, with rare exceptions. But when
translating English text into a ‘bidi’ (bi-directional) language
such as Hebrew or Arabic, extra mark-up is needed to indicate which
text is read from right to left and which from left to right.
The tutorial Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other
Right-to-left Scripts explains the HTML mark-up. For
even more details, see the section Text direction in Internationalization
techniques: Authoring HTML & CSS. (Hint: Look for ‘Best
practices checklist’.)
Copyright and attribution
The W3C copyright license allows anybody to make
translations, but there are conditions. In brief, you can make a
translation as long as you clearly indicate in the translation
where the original is and as long as you allow W3C to re-publish
that translation.
See the IPR
FAQ, in particular the sections on translating specifications, translating other documents, and ‘official'
translations.
If you give us the translated text of one of the CSS pages and
we publish it on the W3C site, our system automatically adds the
required information and a link. It also adds the name of the
translator and a link to his home page. (If you wish, you may also
replace your name with the name of your organization, or remain
anonymous.)
Language negotiation
In most cases, the W3C server returns an English document and
only serves a translated document if the user explicitly asks for
one, by clicking on the relevant link. But in some cases (some
tutorials, e.g.), things are reversed: the server returns a
document in the language of the user and only returns English if
the user explicitly clicks on the link to the English version.
This process of automatically returning the language that the
user prefers is called language negotiation and it is a feature of
HTTP. The way it works, at least on this site, is that, in addition
to URLs for each individual document, there is one URL that
represents all translations. That URL in our case is formed by
leaving off the en.html extension: if we have an
English document http://www.w3.org/foo.en.html, then
the generic URL is http://www.w3.org/foo.
If the user clicks on a link to the generic URL, the server
looks at the preferred language of the user (which is passed in the
HTTP request) and compares it to the list of available languages.
It then returns the proper document.
Many browsers allow the user to configure
his language preferences (you can even have more than one),
but the default is the language of the browser itself.
That means in general you should omit the extensions
if you link to this server. Only if you make a link specifically to
the English version of a document, you should include
the .en.html at the end of the URL.
Valid HTML
Translations, like all Web documents, must be valid: they must use
HTML and CSS according to the respective specifications. The W3C
validators can check documents for errors: the W3C mark-up validator for the
HTML part and the CSS validator for the CSS part.
In most cases you will not need to change any CSS style sheets
and thus you don't need the CSS validator. In fact, if you think
you need to change some CSS rules, please, contact us first. It may
be that you found a problem in our style sheets that we should know
about.
Although invalid documents may display OK in most current
browsers, valid documents have a much better chance of displaying
correctly in browsers of the future.
For more information about translations, see W3C
Translations.
