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 and template support. More details will be available in a few weeks and listed under our product roadmap.

Languages supported as a beta feature



 * Log in: If you are translating in wikis where Content Translation is enabled, then you will need to first log in using Wikimedia account. If you haven't enrolled to automatically enable beta features, then you will need to enable Content Translation from the beta feature preferences.
 * Create a new translation: When set, you can head to the Special:ContentTranslation page on the wiki and create a new translation by selecting the article you would like to translate, source language and target languages. If the article is already present or is being translated by another user, you will be shown a warning. You will be led to the translation interface from here.
 * 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. If links are not adapted from the source, you can add them by selecting the text in the target and clicking on the highlighted link in the source section. Links can be removed using the Link Cards.
 * Save & Publish: When you start translating a new article, the draft will be automatically saved at regular intervals and added to your dashboard. At any point of time, restart by selecting the article from the list of in-progress translations. After completing the translation, you can press the 'Publish' button. The article will be published under your user namespace. 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
Please provide your feedback at the project talk page. You can also volunteer for:
 * testing sessions
 * new language survey

Bugs and other issues can be reported directly through Phabricator.