Topic on Talk:Content translation

Shock and Awe - please take Swahili out!!!

2
Kipala (talkcontribs)

I was curious and registered. Tried it in Swahili where most of my work is). Ok, Swahili is not available for machine translation (which was a relief for me, because google translate does definitely NOT work for Swahili, and I do not expect this tool to be fundamentally better).

BUT it is still possible to click "Publish translation" . Why ?

Can you please set the programm so that it does NOT invite anybody to publish anything in Swahili? Because people will try - and then there is mess to be cleared up (which we do not need at all).

Generally I would like you to think once more about offering and propagating such a tool for any of the "small" languages. Encouraging machine translation for small languages is a receipe for desaster.. I say this because at swwiki we had been "blessed" with a google project 5 years ago (article creation competition, laptops to win) wich encouraged to use the google translation feature. The result was generally negative: heaps of bullshit uploaded. Because if tempts you to try to use on a complete very long article of the enwiki. Large majority did not take the time really to go thru this mass of text, and probably after some hours was too tired to continue srutinizing, so the way out was "SAVE". WHich means bullshit uploaded.

For smaller wikis (with small regular editor base) and languages not close to English such a tool should NEVER be propagated nor people invited to use it.

For now: Please just take Swahili out of your tool.

Pginer-WMF (talkcontribs)

Hi Kipala,

Thanks for your feedback. I understand your concerns about translation tools, especially after the negative experience the community had in the past with other tools. However, I would encourage you to give Content Translation a try because:

  • Content Translation has been designed for the way people translate in Wikipedia. For example, it does not provide a translation for the full article, which makes the user to add content paragraph by paragraph instead of generating the "mass of text" you described as problematic with other tools. This is just an example to illustrate that we contacted editors to learn from their process and test our ideas (I wrote an overview on the process).
  • Result in other wikis are encouraging. Since January, we have been enabling Content Translation in several wikis of different kinds and the results are very positive. 415 articles were published for a big wiki such as French with no Machine translation support. 731 articles were published from Spanish to a smaller wiki such as Catalan where good Machine Translation is available. In any case, deletion ratios have been really low, and published translations are tagged as "contenttranslation" which makes it easy for the community to evaluate the quality of the created content.
  • It is still work in progress and we need community feedback to keep improving the tool. Reusing content from other languages can be really helpful and our preliminary results tell us that this tool can help to save time to the community. Currently the tool is exposed as a beta feature for logged-in users only. That combined with the focus on translation of existing content (e.g., you cannot add a random picture) makes it hard to imagine the tool used for vandalism more than the regular editing tools can.

When providing tools for more than 300 languages it is important to hear from the different specific contexts. We are really interested on identifying potential issues that may happen in Swahili, so feel free to point us to any issue when you identify any.

Thanks!

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