Content translation/Documentation/FAQ

What is the Content Translation tool?
It's a tool that helps editors create a new article based on a corresponding article about the same topic in a different language.

How does the Content Translation tool differ from Translate?
The Translate extension was initially built with focus on translating software user interface messages for MediaWiki and other programs. It can also translate MediaWiki pages, but experience shows that it's not so practical for translating articles of the kind that you can find in Wikipedia, Wikivoyage or similar sites: it requires adding markup to the source article to prepare it for translation, and it can mess things up if the source article changes drastically, as it often happens in Wikipedia. This works fairly well for documentation in mediawiki.org, meta and many other sites, but it doesn't scale for Wikipedia.

How can I access the tool?
You can find a very early testing version in Wikimedia Labs.

Is it available for all users of a wiki?
It will be initially available to logged-in users who enable it as a beta feature. The intention is to offer it to all users eventually.

Can it be used only to translate articles?
The focus for initial development is articles in Wikipedia and possibly Wikivoyage. It may be enhanced to articles in the style of other sites later.

Will there be special features to insert links and references from the original article?
Links will be automatically inserted using interlanguage links.

The software will make and effort to adapt references as much as it will be possible to do it between languages. This may be challenging to do fully automatically, given that different languages use different citation formats.