Template talk:Literal translation

Quotation marks
Should this template automatically add quotation marks around the translated phrase? It seems more normal to, and sampling the first five articles that use this template, they all add quotation marks manually inside the template to get around it, lit. '"like this"'. --Lord Belbury (talk) 16:24, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Ravenpuff added a fix of adding apostrophes around all translated phrases (even if they already have double quotemarks), I guess on the grounds that '"a phrase with three notches around it"' is better than none, which makes sense. I made some progress on a template (Template:Add quotemarks) back in April to detect quotation marks and add more only when necessary, but it tailed off (Bot_requests/Archive_80). --Lord Belbury (talk) 10:50, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

&amp;thinsp;s
Are the &amp;thinsp;s in this template a hangover from when this template lacked quotemarks, and needed to put more whitespace before the words? On my browser it means there's slightly more of a space to the right of each "or" than to the left. (Example: lit. 'here' or 'there' or 'everywhere')

I just took out the unnecessary-looking space in the middle of the  on the left side assuming it was somehow causing it, but realised afterwards it was maybe keeping both whitespaces balanced, and put it back. (And it didn't actually make any difference to the uneven spacing.) User:Menchi left them in when fixing up the template recently, and added more: are they doing anything important, and do you have any idea what's causing the uneven spacing? --Lord Belbury (talk) 10:59, 11 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Hi Belbury, good eyes! Those pesky extra spaces after "or" should be banished now. I'm utterly untrained in template codes, so I cleaned up by trials and errors, hoping no site-wide damages.
 * The template was apparently a barely-customized template:circa, which also gave rise to template:Translation (the usefulness of which is questionable IMO). The evidence is that unhelpful "– lit." oddness (now "or") is exactly like "ca. 2000 – ca. 2010" (range of approximate years). Other baggages like  and   aren't really applicable or needed here. Doing away with those fixed the unwanted spatial asymmetry you noticed.  This is pretty much the extent to my insights about template coding; hopefully it helped. --Menchi (talk) 11:25, 13 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Good work, and a relief to hear it wasn't some obscure browser issue. Thanks for fixing the template up. --Lord Belbury (talk) 12:39, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

hide "lit" for simple glosses
I'd like to suggest a way to hide the characters "lit." in the output for simple glosses. This template refers to MOS:SINGLE, as it should, for style in handling simple glosses. However, the example there doesn't include the "lit." lead-in. There are cases when it's good to have "lit." for clarity, especially after a long list of language variants. But there are many cases where a simple gloss just needs the quotes. Doing this would help with consistency in usage as well. A lot of times editors use double quotes. Using this template for the simple cases as well would provide more consistent treatment. Additionally, if this template has an option to hide the "lit." part, it might be helpful to create a template gl or something like that is a shorthand for lit with the option set to exclude "lit.".Coastside (talk) 18:11, 30 November 2020 (UTC)


 * @Coastside As far as I can tell, what you’re looking for is covered by Gloss/sandbox. Gloss is currently a redirect to Glossary, but the redirect isn’t used or advertised anywhere, so all it would take is moving the sandbox to the template main and you’re away. Probably best to check in with @SMcCandlish to be sure though. — HTGS (talk) 04:30, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I can't see any problem with that.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:03, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
 * ✅. I cleaned up the template code and documentation, and added mention of the new  at MOS:SINGLE.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:06, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics § Template consistency
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics § Template consistency. Est. 2021 (talk · contribs) 10:25, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Missing HTML classes
I was just setting up some custom CSS to make translations and such easier to read when I noticed this template doesn't add the classes "gloss-text" and "gloss-quot" to the output, unlike gloss. Is that intentional, or should they be added?

Maybe the best solution is to just have this template transclude gloss?

— W.andrea (talk) 02:37, 17 March 2024 (UTC)


 * I went ahead and made this template transclude gloss. — W.andrea (talk) 20:50, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

Capitalisation
Do lit. translations need to be capitalised? Like lit. 'this is an example' or lit. 'This Is an Example'? ／talk 15:37, 13 June 2024 (UTC)