Thread:Talk:Content translation/Translating HTML?

I came to this project today after reading a very surprising (to me) statement : «copies the HTML and saves it to the user page. It must be changed so that the edited HTML would be converted to maintainable wiki text before saving». So you plan to translate HTML rather than wikitext? I never heard of this and I couldn't find a mention of this crucial architectural decision anywhere; only an incidental mention in a subpage, «ability of MT providers to take html and give the translations back without losing these annotations».

If you're translating HTML, why? Because of VisualEditor I suppose? Are the annotations above those that parsoid uses?

Does this mean that you're not going to translate wikitext at all and that you'll just drop all templates, infoboxes and so on? Did anyone before ever try to reverse engineer HTML to guess the local wikitext for it? Isn't it like building thousands of machine translation language pairs, one for every dialect of wikitext (each wiki has its own)?

The most surprising thing (for me) in the Google Translator Toolkit machine translation experiments on Wikipedia was that they reported they were able to automatically translate even templates (names + parameters) and categories after a while. If true, this was fantastic because traslating templates is very time consuming and boring (when translating articles manually, I usually just drop templates). Do you think that was/is possible? Will/would this be possible with the machine translation service of choice or with translation memory?

Once again, if machine translation is not a big component of this project forgive me for the silly question, but update Thread:Talk:Content translation/Machine translation.