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. This tool will complement the Translate extension that many of you may be familiar with. 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.

The main components envisioned to be part of the UX designs are the Translation Center, Translation View and the Entry points leading to them. The Translation Center would serve as a dashboard for users to track translations done by them. The Translation View would consist of the editing area along with translation tools that will be available for use. For this round of development, the Translation View has been given priority.

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 have been considered for inclusion in the Content Translation tool. The primary objective 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 in consideration are 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. Information about common queries are posted on the FAQ page regularly and we look forward to more contributions. More information about the technical architecture and the implementation details 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) Go to http://es.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Especial:ContentTranslation and create a user login
 * 2) Select the source language (currently restricted to Spanish) and search for the name of the article you wish to translate
 * 3) Select the target language (currently restricted to Catalan) and write the title of the article in the box (optional)
 * 4) 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