Content translation/Announcements/Announcement-October2014/vls

We are pleased to announce the new version of the Content Translation tool with machine translation support for Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese using Apertium as the machine translation backend system.

The Content Translation tool, developed by the Language Engineering team of the Wikimedia Foundation, is particularly useful for multilingual editors who can create new articles from corresponding articles in another language. The tool features a minimal rich-text editor with translation tools like dictionaries and machine translation support. The first version of the tool was released for beta-testers in July 2014 and the second version has been released for beta-testers on 30th September 2014.

Some of the features included in this version originated from feedback received from the community, either during usability testing sessions, or as comments and suggestions from our initial users. Editors from the Catalan Wikipedia provided constant feedback after the first release of the tool and also during the recent roundtable.

Highlights from this version

 * Automatic adaptation of categories.
 * Text formatting with a simple toolbar in the Chrome browser. In Firefox, this support is limited only to keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-B for bold, Ctrl-I for italics).
 * Bi-directional machine translation support for Spanish and Portuguese
 * Machine translation support from Catalan to Spanish
 * Paragraph alignment improvements to better match original and translated sentences.
 * More accurate detection for the use of Machine Translation suggestions without further corrections, with warnings shown to the user
 * Redesigned top bar and progress bar.
 * Numerous bug fixes.

Please refer to the release plan to know more about the complete list of features for this version.

Next Release
The next release of the tool is scheduled for November 18, 2014.

Availability of the tool
Users can try the Content Translation tool at: http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:ContentTranslation

As the tool is currently available on our beta servers, users will not be able to use Wikimedia authentication. A new account will have to be created.

After logging in, users will have to make the following selections:


 * 1) source language - the language of the article to translate from. Can be Catalan, Spanish or Portuguese
 * 2) target language - the language of the article to translate into. Can be Catalan, Spanish or Portuguese
 * 3) article name - title of the article to translate

After translation, users can publish the translation in their own namespace on the same wiki. If the newly created page looks good enough for a real Wikipedia, you can copy it over. You can find a list of all the pages created using Content Translation in this page.

Feedback and Participation
Please provide your feedback at the project talk page. You can also volunteer for our testing sessions.