Content translation/Announcements/Announcement-July2014

The Content Translation tool is now available for logged-in users at: http://es.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Especial:ContentTranslation. With this tool, multilingual editors can select an existing article and translate it to create a new page for the corresponding article in another language. The tool features a minimal rich-text editor, with translation tools like dictionaries and machine translation support. For the current release, machine translation and dictionaries are only between Spanish and Catalan, using Apertium. In later releases, other translation engines and more dictionaries are planned for inclusion.

About ContentTranslation
Aimed to improve multilingual contribution, Content Translation is a Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tool aimed to make translation of Wikipedia articles easier and better. The tool is targeted for users who know two or more languages.

Creating a new Wikipedia page based on an existing one from a different language normally requires the use of automatic translation services, dictionaries, reformatting text, tweaking links and references, and a lot of tab switching. Content translation will allow you to create an initial version of a Wikipedia page based on an existing version from a different language.

Key components that are part of the long term user experience are the Translation Center, Translation View and the entry points leading to the translation view. (See Diagram). In the current release, only the Translation View has been released. The Translation View consists of the editing area along with translation tools that will be available for use.

The Translation Center would serve as a dashboard for users to track translations done by them.

The entry points will indicate to the users that translations can be initiated for specific pages for languages that may be appropriate for the user (based on factors like geographic location). For the current release users can select the source and target languages and the article they wish to translate from the main page. Presently the selection tool allows selecting of Spanish and Catalan as the source and target languages respectively. However, interested users of other languages can also try the tool by changing URL parameters, with limited functionality.

Several translation tools are to be included in the Content Translation tool in the long run. The primary focus of the tool is to aid the user with Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tools that can significantly decrease their effort while creating articles from existing content. The tools include Machine Translation (MT) engines, Translation Memory (TM) systems, bilingual dictionaries, glossaries, language proofing tools such as spell-checkers. The usefulness of these tools may vary according to the degree of support for individual languages and user's familiarity and proficiency with the source and target languages.

Documentation
You can begin using the Content Translation tool and follow the progress of the project through our regular updates. We look forward to more contributions. More information about technical architecture and software for Content Translation can be found in the extensive technical documentation pages.

How to Use
As mentioned, the current release primarily focuses on the Spanish-Catalan language pair for initial testing and feedback. Users can translate articles from the Spanish Wikipedia into Catalan. The newly created page is published in the users namespace and does not affect the Catalan Wikipedia unless the user chooses to copy it over. Steps to use the tool are outlined in the following section.

The tool is not released to real wikipedias. We are deploying it in the beta wiki instances to gather feedback.

Catalan Users

 * 1) Create a user login (if you don't have one already) at  http://es.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/
 * 2) After logging in go to: http://es.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Especial:ContentTranslation
 * 3) Select the source language (currently restricted to Spanish) and search for the name of the article you wish to translate
 * 4) Select the target language (currently restricted to Catalan) and write the title of the article in the box (optional)
 * 5) Click the button to begin translation

You will be taken to the editing interface where the first column will display content from the source page, the second column will display the text input area and the third column will display suggestions from the translation aids. By clicking on Add Translation, Catalan users will see a machine translated version of the source text being inserted in the second column. The text can be edited by the users.

To publish, press the Publish Translation button at the top of the page. The page will be saved in the users namespace with the selected title. The page can be verified and copied to the Catalan Wikipedia like a regular article.

All Other Users
Users of other languages can use the following tweak to get the editor and publish translations.


 * 1) Go to http://es.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Especial:ContentTranslation and create a user login
 * 2) Type the following url in the address bar of your web browser and substitute the values indicated:

http://es.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:ContentTranslation?page= &from=&to=&targettitle=

For instance, to translate the article Australia from English to Burmese use:

http://es.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:ContentTranslation?page=Australia&from=en&to=my&targettitle=

Note: &targettitle= is an optional parameter and the user can specify the article title from the editor.

Caveats and Known Issues

 * 1) Templates are discarded by default. But for Spanish-Catalan language pair, some templates are supported. Editing of templates might not be possible, they are copied to translation. The editor can later edit it using wikitext or visual editor. Support for templates is harder problem and will be improved in future releases.
 * 2) Simple reference adaptation is supported. They are copied from source article
 * 3) Rich text editing support is minimal. The browser's native rich text editing is used. There are no editor controls like Bold, Italics etc. Users may use shortcuts like control+b to make text bold. We don't have plans to bring extensive rich text editing like Visual Editor in this tool since bootstrapping new articles is primary focus. But basic rich text editing features will be added in later releases.Example: Bold, Italics, Bullet list, Headers etc.
 * 4) The dictionary support for Spanish-Catalan language pair is with the help of dictionary that is coming with Apertium. The dictionary is not elaborate. We are trying to identify free licensed dictionaries for various language pairs
 * 5) The published content is under User namespace. Since the current version is deployed in wikipedia beta instance, it may not have all templates to render the output properly.
 * 6) For a list of open bugs in this tool see bugzilla

Feedback
Catalan Wikipedia users can add their feedback in this page. The general feedback page for all users can be added through this topic on the ContentTranslation talk page
 * Great work! Some info that may be useful for you: User:Arnaugir has a bot wich automatically translates complext spanish references templates to catalan. You may contact him and include the code in your work.--Kippelboy (talk) 08:44, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Is there a test calendar or some kind of agenda? or you just want us to do some tests during the firsts days to find bugs. If you give us tasks, we can test particular things, don't hesitate to ask :-)--Kippelboy (talk) 08:44, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * There is a testing set that our UX designer Pau conducts. Its quite elaborate and you can sign up for it. But that shouldn't stop you from doing free tests on your own by following the overall workflow and mixing it with how you would generally translate a page.--Runa Bhattacharjee (talk) 17:53, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

How to type in non-Latin scripts
I was just trying to test it for Odia and the interface seems to be interactive. A few issues: If these issues are already in the pipeline for solving, then well and good! Else, could please I request to add them? --Psubhashish (talk) 12:32, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
 * There is no ULS integration and would greatly appreciate if that could be added. A lot many other language users could test their languages.
 * Bold/Italics: Changing from one face to another is tricky - if you want to keep the text bold/italics then you need to start after one character of the text that you want to change to bold/italics, and type in your own script. Then, delete the source script.
 * For simplification of the interface, you have kept the wiki mark-up invisible. But how about the interlinks and images.
 * At this moment, the article is getting created on Spanish Wikipedia. How about creating the draft in editor's home wiki. Is that not possible to tweak as one needs to change the URL and insert his/her home wiki's language code?

Thank You Notes

 * 1) Apertium team-especially Dr.Mikel L Forcada and  Francis Tyres
 * 2) Amical
 * 3) Volunteers from around the world who helped test the usability of features
 * 4) Parsoid team - Gabriel Wicke, Subbu Sastry
 * 5) Ops team - Alexandros Kosiaris, Mark Bergsma, Faidon Liambotis.
 * 6) Core team - Antoine Musso, Bryan Davis, Greg Grossmeier
 * 7) Engineering Communications and Community Liaison teams - Jan Eissfeldt, Quim Gil, Guillaume Paumier, Tilman Bayer and others
 * 8) Yuvi Panda