Help:Content translation/Translating/Initial machine translation

When adding a new paragraph to the translation you can choose whether to start from scratch or use an automatic translation as a starting point. When available, machine translation is used by default as an initial translation. The options available, details about their availability, and the considerations about using machine translation are described below.

Options for the initial translation
The "initial translation" options in the tools column allow you to decide the initial content to use as a starting point for each paragraph. The options available are the following:


 * Use a machine translation service. This allows you to start with an automatically translated version f the original paragraph. The number and name of these options will vary. Options such as "Use Apertium" or "Use Yandex" will be available depending on the supported languages for these services (more on this on the next section).
 * Copy original content. The original paragraph will be copied over into the translation. Although content will remain in the original language, some elements are adapted to the target wiki. for example, links will point to the corresponding article in the target language, and templates will be converted into the equivalent ones. Translators still have to rewrite the content completely, but the adapted elements may be easier to reuse.
 * Start with an empty paragraph. Starting with an empty paragraph can be useful in cases where the alternative content requires more work than just typing it.

You can quickly switch between the different approaches independently on each paragraph, since each one may work best on different kinds of content. Switching between the different approaches preserves the changes you made on the paragraph. In this way, you can try a different approach even if you started editing the original one without the fear to lose your changes if you finally decide to go back to the original approach. Two additional options are relevant in this context:


 * The reset translation option is available when you made modifications on the initial content provided. It allows to restore the initial content by discarding the changes you made.
 * The mark as default option is available when you select an approach for a paragraph that is not the default. It allows to set the default approach for the next paragraphs that are added to the translation. This can be very convenient if you found that a particular translation service works generally better than the default one.

Machine translation availability
Content translation integrates several translation services. Each service support a different set of languages. The services supported are listed below with a link to the list of languages they support:


 * Apertium (languages supported).
 * LingoCloud (languages supported).
 * Matxin (languages supported).
 * Yandex (languages supported).
 * Youdao (languages supported).

The list of languages above point to the configuration code to make sure that the information is in sync with the way the tool currently works. The list show the language code for the source language at the initial indentation level and the codes of all the supported target languages below it.

External services integrated only receive publicly available wiki content, and return a translated version f such content that is compatible with the licenses used in the wiki. No personal information is shared with the translation services.

Expanding the language support
Content translation has been designed as an extensible platform.You can develop new clients to integrate additional translation services.

Report the languages you miss automatic translation for, and let us know about services that provide a good translation quality for your language.

Considerations on machine translation
Machine translation is far from perfect when use