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 They are likely to be somewhat out of date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!
You don't have to be a professional translator, but we do prefer
translations into your native language, for better quality. Machine
translations are of too low quality, so please don't send us any.
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-letter
language code for your language. If there exists no 2-letter
code, please use the 3-letter code instead.
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 wait for HTML5, which has a special element
for dates…)
Translating into Hebrew or Arabic
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 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.
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.
Concretely, that means 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.
As I said above, in most cases the W3C server gives the English
document anyway, even if the URL has no .en.html at
the end, but in some cases language negotiation is enabled and the
shorter URL returns a translated document.
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.
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.
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.
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.
翻译：