Content translation/Announcements/Announcement-November2014

The newest version of Content Translation tool was recently completed. The updated version is not yet available for use due to technical blockers on the beta labs infrastructure.

This is the third release of the Content Translation tool, developed by Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Engineering team. The tool provides a rich editing interface with several tools to create new wiki articles from existing articles in another language. For several languages users can simplify the translation workflow by using the machine translation powered by Apertium. The last version was released on September 30th 2014.

Highlights from this version

The new version adds two important features -

1. saving unpublished ongoing translations
2. a dashboard with limited features where users can view the articles that they translated, and to load unpublished drafts.

This will provide added flexibility for our users to continue their work over a longer period of time. The dashboard will be enhanced further in future releases.

Other highlights:

• Categories are now adapted similarly to links - If there is a category in the target language, that directly corresponds to a category in the source language, it will be added to the translated article automatically.
• Marking pages with excessive unedited machine translated text - If a user publishes a page despite getting a warning that it seems to include too much machine translation, the page will be added to a category so that wiki editors would be able to check it easily.
• The selector for the source and target languages and articles was redesigned.
• The top bar of the editor was redesigned.

Next Release

The next release is scheduled for January 13, 2015. The main focus would be to stabilize the translation interface in preparation for making the tool available as a beta-feature on selected Wikipedias.

How to Use

As the tool is currently available on our beta servers, users will not be able to use Wikimedia authentication. A new account will have to be created. After logging in, users will have to enable the Content Translation beta-feature

Next, go to http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:ContentTranslation and make the following selections using the selector displayed by clicking 'Create New Translation' button:

1. source language - the language of the article to translate from. Can be Catalan, Spanish or Portuguese
2. target language - the language of the article to translate into. Can be Catalan, Spanish or Portuguese
3. article name - title of the article to translate

After translation, users can publish the translation in their own namespace on the same wiki. If the newly created page looks good enough for a real Wikipedia, you can copy it over. You can find a list of all the pages created using Content Translation in this page.

Feedback and Participation

Please provide your feedback at the project talk page. You can also volunteer for our testing sessions.