Content translation/Announcement-January2015

Content Translation is now available as a beta feature in eight selected Wikipedias. Content Translation supports the creation of new articles by simplifying the translation process. Users are welcome to try the tool and provide their feedback.

This release coincides with the 4th version completed as part of the development cycle. The tool is designed, developed and maintained by Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Engineering team. It consists of a translation editor, a user dashboard and several tools to create new wiki articles from existing articles in another language. For several languages users can speed-up the translation workflow by using the machine translation (MT) powered by Apertium. The last version was released on November 18th 2014.

Supported Languages
Content Translation provides different degrees of support for each language based on community feedback and technical considerations. The current supported languages are listed below, but this list is expected to be expanded soon.

Highlights from this version
The focus for this version was to increase stability of the tool and prepare for deployment as a beta feature.
 * Translations are now automatically saved and users can continue their translation work from the translation dashboard until it is ready to publish.
 * Users can start a new translation using Content Translation from their contributions page.
 * An important feature was completed that made the tool more robust when transferring the formatting and links of the source paragraph into a translated paragraph.
 * Configurable settings have been introduced that can allow publishing to the main namespace of a wiki.
 * Major bugs that affected the translation workflow were fixed during this time.

Next Release
For our next version, we will focus on expanding the list of supported languages and improve key features like link adaptation. More details will be available in a few weeks and listed under our product roadmap.

Further plans include improving the support for languages for which machine translation is not available and languages written right-to-left, adding translated paragraphs to already existing articles, adding more machine translation engines and dictionaries, and smarter handling of templates.

Languages supported as a beta feature



 * Log in: Log in to one of the supported Wikipedias using a Wikimedia account. Make sure to enable Content Translation from the beta feature preferences.
 * Create a new translation: When set, your contributions page will show a "New contribution" menu that will provide access to the translation dashboard ( the Special:ContentTranslation page ). Create a new translation by selecting the article you would like to translate, source language and target languages. You will be led to the translation interface from here.
 * Create a new translation straight from the source article: If you are viewing a page in a wiki where the extension is installed, and you selected one of the languages supported by ContentTranslation as your language in the preferences, and there is no page about the same topic in your language, a red link with your language’s name will be shown in the interlanguage links area. Clicking it will show a panel which will lead to the translation interface.
 * Translate: On the translation interface you can translate the article. For some languages, machine translations will help you with the first version of the contents in each section. This can be edited to make sure the content reads natural in our language. Most links will be automatically created in the translation, but you can always add them by selecting the text in the translation and click on the highlighted link in the source text.
 * Save & Publish: When you start translating a new article, the draft will be automatically saved at regular intervals in your dashboard. At any point of time, you can continue the translation. After completing the translation, you can press the 'Publish' button. The article will be published under your user namespace for you to further review. You can then move it to the main namespace of the Wikipedia. Editors of the Catalan Wikipedia can directly publish the new page in the main namespace. This feature is not enabled in any of the other Wikis at the moment.

Other languages
If you would like use Content Translation in a language that is not currently supported, you will need to use a tweak.
 * 1) Enable the beta feature on any of the language Wikipedias mentioned above or on the beta server wiki (recommended). If using the latter, you will need to get a separate account.
 * 2) You can adjust the URL parameters to select a specific article and set of languages. In the example below, article Australia is translated from English (en) to Burmese (my) on the beta wiki:  http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:ContentTranslation?page=Australia&from=en&to=my This provides a translation side-by-side interface for you but you still can't receive machine translation for languages, that wasn't opted-in.

Feedback and Participation
As a beta feature, there are many areas to keep improving. We need your help to identify what has more impact in the process of translating articles across the 288 languages supported in Wikipedia. Please provide your feedback at the project talk page. You can also volunteer for:
 * testing sessions where you can try the tool in order to identify issues and opportunities for improvement.
 * new language survey where you can provide information on the support of existing tools for your language. This is helpful to decide which could be the next languages to support.

Bugs and other issues can be reported directly through Phabricator.

Thank you notes
We would like to thank everyone for their continued encouragement and feedback. We would especially like to thank all the editors who have been relentlessly creating articles on the beta servers and our friends at Apertium who went out of their way to help us integrate their machine translation service within the Wikimedia infrastructure. Lastly, our team-mates at Wikimedia Foundation who provided us constant guidance and support over the last 6 months.