Content translation/Section translation

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T243495

Section translation is an expansion of the current Content Translation capabilities. Section translation enables users to expand existing Wikipedia articles by translating new sections. In addition, Section Translation is designed to work on mobile devices (in addition to desktop) using a modernized front-end architecture. In this way, users will have new opportunities to translate that were not possible with Content Translation before.

Section Translation Screencast

Section translation is the main project of the Boost initiative which is aimed at expanding the use of translation to help more communities to grow. Below you can find more information about the wikis the project will be focusing on.

Please, provide any feedback about this initiative in the discussion page. We are interested in hearing your ideas on how to help communities grow by using translation. More details and updates are provided below.

Try the tool[edit]

Section translation is in early development. For now it is available at a test server and Wikipedias in several languages:

ace Achinese
am Amharic
ar Arabic
arz Egyptian Arabic
as Assamese
ast Asturian
ay Aymara
az Azerbaijani
azb South Azerbaijani
ba Bashkir
ban Balinese
bcl Central Bikol
be Belarusian
bg Bulgarian
bh Bhojpuri
bjn Banjar
bm Bambara
bn Bangla
bo Tibetan
bs Bosnian
bug Buginese
ca Catalan
ceb Cebuano
ckb Central Kurdish
co Corsican
crh Crimean Tatar
cs Czech
cv Chuvash
cy Welsh
da Danish
din Dinka
dv Divehi
dz Dzongkha
ee Ewe
el Greek
eo Esperanto
et Estonian
eu Basque
fa Persian
ff Fula
fj Fijian
fo Faroese
fur Friulian
fy Western Frisian
gan Gan Chinese
gl Galician
gn Guarani
gom Goan Konkani
gu Gujarati
ha Hausa
haw Hawaiian
he Hebrew
hi Hindi
hr Croatian
ht Haitian Creole
hy Armenian
ig Igbo
ilo Iloko
is Icelandic
jv Javanese
ka Georgian
kab Kabyle
kbp Kabiye
kg Kongo
km Khmer
kn Kannada
ko Korean
ks Kashmiri
ku Kurdish
lb Luxembourgish
lg Ganda
li Limburgish
lmo Lombard
ln Lingala
lo Lao
lt Lithuanian
ltg Latgalian
lv Latvian
mai Maithili
mg Malagasy
mhr Eastern Mari
mi Māori
mk Macedonian
ml Malayalam
mn Mongolian
mni Manipuri
mr Marathi
mrj Western Mari
ms Malay
mt Maltese
my Burmese
ne Nepali
nn Norwegian Nynorsk
nso Northern Sotho
ny Nyanja
oc Occitan
om Oromo
or Odia
pa Punjabi
pag Pangasinan
pap Papiamento
ps Pashto
pt Portuguese
qu Quechua
rn Rundi
ro Romanian
rw Kinyarwanda
sa Sanskrit
sah Yakut
sat Santali
scn Sicilian
sd Sindhi
sh Serbo-Croatian
shn Shan
si Sinhala
sk Slovak
sl Slovenian
sm Samoan
sn Shona
so Somali
sq Albanian
sr Serbian
ss Swati
st Southern Sotho
su Sundanese
sw Swahili
szl Silesian
ta Tamil
te Telugu
tg Tajik
th Thai
ti Tigrinya
tk Turkmen
tl Tagalog
tn Tswana
tpi Tok Pisin
tr Turkish
ts Tsonga
tt Tatar
tum Tumbuka
tw Twi
udm Udmurt
ur Urdu
uz Uzbek
vec Venetian
war Waray
wo Wolof
wuu Wu Chinese
xh Xhosa
yi Yiddish
yo Yoruba
yue Cantonese
zh Chinese
zu Zulu

Direct access[edit]

Section translation allows to link directly to a pre-selected article or section to translate by defining an appropriate url. This can be convenient for the integration with external tools. For example, you can create a link to translate the Moon article or the "Legal status" section of the same article.

Entry points[edit]

Section Translation is integrated with the Wikipedia language selector on mobile. Searching for a language in which the article does not exist yet lets you create a translation for it. This is only available in the languages where Section Translation is already available (which will expand over time).

The language selector surfaces options to translate when searching for a language in which the article is missing (and Section Translation is available)
Recently published translations in the last 10 days show a notice to encourage their review if they have not been edited since (less than 5 edits). Including an option to expand them by translating a new section.
After completing a mobile translation, an invite is shown to translate another section.

Goals and impact[edit]

Language showcase November 2019, featuring the Boost project and Javanese Wikimedia community feedback about Content Translation

These are the main goals for the project and metrics to measure them:

Grow the community of translators. Attract more users to translate (using different devices) that remain active over time and help recruit new translators.
- Metric: Increase the percentage of new editors that completed their second translation in a month.
Grow the content available. Increase the coverage in both the topics available and their depth (information they contain).
- Metric: Double the number of weekly translations on selected wikis (to create new content or extend existing one).

Boost initiative: communities with potential to grow with translation[edit]

Content translation has been successful in supporting the translation process on many Wikipedia communities. It has already helped to create thousands of new articles while encouraging the creation of good quality translations.

We want to focus on Wikipedias with potential to grow by using translation. Research on Section translation and other initiatives to make translation in general more visible such as providing Content Translation access by default (out of beta) will involve and focus on the needs of these particular group of wikis.

This initiative is part of a long-term vision to support cross-wiki content propagation, and it is aligned with the Wikimedia Foundation plans to "Grow participation globally, focusing on emerging markets" and increasing "Worldwide readership".

Communities to focus on[edit]

Wikipedias with less than 100K articles, a significant editing activity for the size of their wiki (more than 70 active editors), and making little use of translation currently (less than 100 translations per month).

Given the above, we initially selected the following Wikipedias: Malayalam, Bengali, Tagalog, Javanese, Albanian, and Mongolian.

As the project becomes more visible, other communities showed interest in the project, and some initiatives will be applied there too. These Wikipedias are Central Bikol and Arabic.

Additional considerations[edit]

This small group of wikis represents a much larger group of communities that can grow with the proposed improvements. Selecting a small set allows us to focus and collaborate more closely with them. Nevertheless, we expect the improvements to benefit a larger number of wikis, and users from all wikis are definitely welcome to participate.

Provide your feedback[edit]

Please, provide any feedback in the discussion page. We are interested in hearing your ideas on how to help communities grow by using translation and Section translation in particular.

You can also check the project in Phabricator to track the progress of the different tasks and share any comment about them.

Research[edit]

The Language Team is also conducting research to better understand the language-related needs of different wikis. This research also supports the design process by evaluating ideas around new ways of expanding existing articles and contributing from mobile devices.

Section Translation Research — The Section Translation Design Research project evaluated current mobile prototypes with two small wikis. The project evaluated not only initial prototypes, but also a number of design changes after each round of testing. The project also supported design exploration by gathering interview data around critical assumptions of Section Translation, including the role of mobile and the relevance of article sections as a meaningful unit of translation.
Section Translation Usability Testing — The Section Translation Usability Testing (Bengali Wikipedia) project aimed to learn about the experiences of the first editors using Section Translation on the Bengali Wikipedia.
Section Translation Entry Points Design Research — The Section Translation Entry Points Design Research project investigated new ways that both experienced and new editors may discover translation opportunities, especially on mobile devices.
Section Translation Post-Improvements Testing — The Section Translation Post-Improvements Testing (Thai Wikipedia) project provided usability testing after a number of tool improvements and at a time when it was becoming available in a greater number of wikis, including Thai Wikipedia.
Section Translation Feedback Survey — Survey feedback was collected with the goal of learning from the experiences of editors who used Section Translation during a Bengali Wikipedia article quality improvement competition in 2022.

Status updates[edit]

Click here to watch this page!

October 2023[edit]

June 2023[edit]

May 2023[edit]

Disabled machine translation for cantonese from NLLB-200 and Google Translate since current translation services is not providing the language variant that the Cantonese Wikipedia (zh-yue) is using.
Enabled Special:Contribute on Desktop on the following set of Wikipedias; Albanian (sq), Bangla (bn), Malayalam (ml), Mongolian (mn), Tagalog (tl)
Enabled Special:Contribute on mobile on the following set of Wikipedias; Albanian (sq), Bangla (bn), Malayalam (ml), Mongolian (mn), Tagalog (tl)
Fixed links not editable in Section Translation editor
Adjustments for back navigation for translation editor to enable users to readjust their action at hand (bookmark for later, change language, select different section, discard, etc.) without losing the previous selection.

April 2023[edit]

Enabled section/content translation for 6 wikipedias; Meadow Mari(mhr), Hill Mari/Western Mari Wikipedia (mrj), Samoan Wikipedia (sm), Danish Wikipedia (da), Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia (sh), Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia (nn)
Enabled section translation for Kashmiri Wikipedia
Supporting in progress translations to allow the user to find the translation in the in-progress list to continue it anytime.
Removed language menu from sticky header on Talk pages
Implemented a Help panel for the new translation dashboard
Provide basic restoring capabilities to mobile translations through continuing an auto-saved translation on mobile
Ensure that translations in all states are properly represented; Translation dashboard in progress list
Fixed deletion of draft translations not working
Completed Meta analysis and reporting for Machine translation, human editors research
Created Gerrit repository for /services/machinetranslation and migrate code from Gitlab

March 2023[edit]

Section translation enabled for Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Catalan and Chinese & Kashmiri Wikipedia
Enabled Content and Section translation on Hawaiian, Pashto, and Xhosa
Preparation work for enabling on more wikis:Updated section title alignment database to help in section mapping issues, Communication when pages are not supported in other languages in the current language selector, adjusting the global limit for unedited MT to 95%, and defining a protocol to adjust translation limits for specific wikis based on data
Improve user experience when translating a section on desktop, by adding a “View page” link, that redirects to the target page, inside the target column of the Content Translation tool.
Improved basic publishing functionality for desktop section translations
Enhance user experience in Section Translation application, by supporting continuing an auto-saved translation on mobile, auto-saving mobile translations on mobile and leaving an autosaving translation on mobile
Improved visibility of “Add languages” and “Language settings” options inside universal language selector, by providing separate access to them
Enhance user experience when translating a section on mobile by displaying a warning to the user when leaving an in-progress translation, when auto-saving has not been completed
Fixed user menu contributor links, showing as a pop up instead of on the menu
Fixed section translation Parallel corpora payload failing to validate during auto-save
Added graph for number of users in the unified stats dashboard
Fix regressions for desktop section and content translation; Content Translation is broken in test wiki, Edit translation button doesn't work for lead sections, Published target page title is wrong for lead translations , Language selector inside "Confirm Translation" step doesn't work properly, CX doesn't load when testing backports on mwdebug servers

February 2023[edit]

Enabled content and section translation in 8 Wikipedias;Egyptian Arabic (arz), Western Frisian (fy), Gan Chinese (gan), Nyanja (ny), Slovak (sk), Southern Sotho (st), Udmurt (udm), Wu (wuu)
Restored the functionality of Content Translation application by fixing breaking bugs caused by Visual Editor updates
Make machine translation stricter by 45% in Kurdish Wikipedia

January 2023[edit]

Fixed regression issue that caused fatal error when trying to restore a draft translation in both Section and Content Translation applications.
Reviewed instrumentation for entry points
Adjust the viewport position after the user taps "Refresh" so that the viewport is placed at the top of the list
Improve user experience when translating block templates inside Section Translation application by displaying a proper message to the user instead of infinitely displaying loading indicator, when template adaptation fails.
Improve user experience when translating block templates inside Section Translation application by fixing bugs related to multiple edits on templates.
Fix URL in Section Translation application to remove duplicate “title” param, to provide a more readable URL.
Made Google translate the default Machine Translation in Central Kurdish Wikipedia
Improved appearance of Visual Editor inside Section Translation application, by removing the unexpected gap below the toolbar.
Added campaign tag for Wiki loves living heritage on content translation
Modified Machine Translation in Czech Wikipedia by 20% or more to publish a translation
Integrated and deployed the feature to use up/down arrows keys to navigate between languages in the Universal Language Selector

December 2022[edit]

Enabled section translation in 6 Wikipedia’s where content translation is available by default;Belarussian (be), Turkmen (tk), Sindhi (sd), Tajik (tg), Tatar (tt), Luxembourgish (lb)
Enhance the user experience when translating an article or a lead section by automatically translating the title of the source article to get the target article title

November 2022[edit]

Enabled Content Translation on mobile and desktop on Wikipedias for two newly supported languages by Google translate: Bambara and Goan Konkani Wikipedias.
Enabled Content Translation on mobile and desktop on six languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Maithili, Maori, Shona and Romanian
Adjusted translation limits for Japanese in response to community feedback.
Improved discovery with new entry point to propose translation as alternative to create a new article from scratch
Translation task prepared for the new persistent contribution entry point, showing the option to translate only when available
More consistent experience by fixing search messages on mobile and entry point layout on desktop.
Improved instrumentation by adding missing metadata
More reliable publishing process across platforms by making redirection to the published page more reliable, improving the placement of published sections when an article has closing sections such as references, and avoiding inserted images to bypass the media viewer.
Support for publishing on the sandbox for users to draft their translations before adding to the main namespace.
More consistent experience by avoiding current language to be shown as missing from language selector based on the current wiki and on the browser preferences.
Adjusted machine translation limits for Western Frisian to make them more strict based on deletion data.
Disabled machine translation for Japanese at the community request after an initial iteration to adjust the MT limits.
More reliable publishing across platforms by unifying section position decisions on the server-side
More consistent discovery by avoiding exposing the option to translate for non-existing pages
Improved support for Norwegian by avoiding articles being misidentified as missing when searching for articles to translate and in the list of suggestions.

October 2022[edit]

More reliable display of section titles in desktop editor by rendering the section title as the document title and avoiding it to also appear inside the contents
More reliable publishing process by avoiding new articles on mobile to be published inside a new section
Improved access to translation context by providing access to the original links when translating a sentence on mobile.
Enable the Arabic google MT to Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia as a translation starting point since the language has some similarities with the Arabic language.
Fixed production issue on section translation publishing, by adding checks for non-existing target title.
Improve user experience while translating a section in mobile, sentence-by-sentence, by providing an option to retry the translation request, when the request for machine translation of a sentence fails for some reason.
Improve the user experience when searching inside Universal Language Selector, by hiding the invitation for translating an article in missing languages, when user types inside the language filter input
Increased visibility and accessibility to Content/Section Translation by adding a new “Translations” button (entrypoint) inside the Special:Contribute page, that redirects the user to the Special:ContentTranslation page.

September 2022[edit]

Better experience during section translation preview and publishing by updating publish result message when publish target is updated.
Fixed regression issue for publishing result explanatory message, when publishing target is the user's sandbox.
Fixed errenours message showing in section translation during translation
Fixed publishing failure by ensuring publish button is enabled after some edits or publish target changed
Persist Machine Translation option across sessions in Section Translation application
Section translation enabled in 9 wikipedias; Amharic, Bosnian, Cebuano,Haitian Creole,Khmer, Latvian, Odia, Sinhala & Somali;
Enabled content and section translation in 8 Wikipedias with new machine translation support from Google; Divehi/Maldivian, Ewe, Guarani,Manipuri/Meitei, Quechua, Sanskrit, Tigrinya, and Twi
Enabled section translation on 6 wikipedias; Latin, Hawaiian, Pashto, Russian, Ukrainian and Xhosa.
Enabled Content and Section Translation in Bhojpuri Wikipedia, Bambara and Goan Konkani Wikipedias
Supporting loading a section contents on a working translation editor

August 2022[edit]

Improved persistence by incorporating mobile translations to the parallel corpora
More clear description of translation services by updating the NLLB-200 label on mobile.
More clarity in publishing process by accurately describing the effect of publishing for new articles.
Better visibility on translator adoption by instrumenting some of the new entry points
Fix issues for existing entrypoints (recent translation entrypoint)

July 2022[edit]

Enabled Section and Content Translation as default on 11 languages that got machine translation support for the first time thanks to the No Language Left Behind project.
Section translation enabled on Uzbek Wikipedia
Improve user experience when selecting sentences during Section Translation by fixing selection occasional failures.
Fix production issue related to some edge cases in publishing.
Improved user experience for the mobile language searcher entrypoint to Section Translation, by ensuring that the “Suggested languages” header is always visible when the entrypoint is visible
Deployed parallel corpora integration for section translations, which was a prerequisite step for the unification desktop/mobile application
More reliable support for references by avoiding references to disappear when publishing.
Improved machine translation support by updating Apertium to the latest version.
Improved accessibility by supporting keyboard navigation in language selection more reliably.
More reliable publish process by avoiding issues when setting edit tags
More reliable translation process by avoiding issues when selecting the sentence to translate.
Improved persistence by using primary keys in database
Better guidance by providing specific messaging at the publishing step when translating a new article

June 2022[edit]

Verified that math formulas are not accounted for the unmodified machine translation percentage
More reliable loading of translations by avoiding content lost when it contains invalid templates
Better discovery by surfacing missing languages relevant to the user on the language selector.
More reliable invites to translate by avoiding to show the current language as missing in the selector, correctly placing the dialog in the screen and adjusting code dependencies.
More solid language detection by gracefully handling the lack of browser language information.
Better support for templates by preventing translation service issues with unavailable templates
Improved content layout by avoiding floating elements that make paragraphs to wrap.
Cleaner visual design by adjusting the item style on the language selector.
Shared results from survey to Bengali Wikipedia campaign participants using Section Translation completing the
Completed basic support for block templates by showing a specific template card and avoiding getting stuck loading when templates are not available in the target language.
Improved identification of missing sections by integrating a new section mapping database
More reliable publishing process by avoiding unrelated sections to be overwritten.
More solid codebase by better handling window resizing.
Updated the translation services used by default based on data and community feedback for Belarusian, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, and Basque.
More reliable list of missing languages by avoiding the current language to appear.
Performance improvements by delaying the load of the UI library.
Updated language pairs for Apertium
More reliable discovery by ensuring access to the tool when selecting the option to translate into other languages.
More reliable communication of template status by ensuring the status is communicated only after loading the data to avoid glitches.
More reliable section mapping by avoiding the lead section not to be picked for new articles.
Easier review process by providing a more accurate edit summary for new articles translated on mobile.
Better guidance by providing access to documentation when no machine translation service is available.
Improved accessibility by adjusting the target area for links on language selector items to allow opening in a new tab.
Machine translation support for 17 new languages with Flores, 13 of them without previous machine translation before.

May 2022[edit]

Section translation enabled on Hebrew, Czech, Greek, Turkish, Korean, Zulu Serbian Wikipedias (also enabled Content Translation by default).
Section Translation enabled on 12 Wikipedias (Central Bikol, Assamese, Tsonga, Gujarati, Swahili, Urdu, Marathi, Kannada, Nepali, Punjabi, Macedonian, and Icelandic)
Enabled Content Translation Korean Wikipedia
More fluent experience by supporting scrolling reliably in the dashboard without getting stuck after a language change and by supporting refreshing suggestions unlimited times.
Better code quality by migrating front-end technology to the latest version (Vue 3).
Improved machine translation support by updating the latest version of Apertium language packages.
Restricted access to less experienced users on Vietnamese Wikipedia at community request.
Compiled translation samples for evaluating user edits on machine translation for an upcoming research study
More reliable category support by avoiding duplicate category prefixes
Improved suggestions by ensuring refresh option updates the suggestion lists.
Improved support for Right-toLeft languages by resolving issues from the initial RTL review
More solid access to translate by avoiding loading issues when accessing the dashboard
More reliable access to missing frequent languages
More solid publishing by respecting spaces between sentences.
Enabled support for machine translation with Flores in Content Translation test instance on a new set of languages

April 2022[edit]

Enabled Section Translation in Persian Wikipedia and Basque Wikipedia
More solid infrastructure by updating cloud instances, Apertium packages and fixing database install process.
Improved discoverability by providing access to Content Translation in new Vector’s sticky header
Achieved more reliable experience by fixing regressions after migration to latest version of frontend technology (Vue 3): avoid toolbar duplications, ensure search field gets input focus automatically
Achieved a more focused experience by hiding unnecessary templates
Improved persistence by creating needed tables to store sections translated.
Entry point to encourage review of recently translated articles encourages quality improvements and discovery of section translation
Better template support by generating mappings across templates for six languages, and supporting empty attributes
Better guidance by clarifying text of error and warnings when publishing.
Easier access to Section Translation by supporting mobile entry points to enable the Content Translation beta feature automatically
Improved detection of missing sections by generating section alignments using a new approach from the Research team.
Created survey to learn more about users using Section Translation in a campaign on Bengali Wikipedia.
Better cross-device support by avoiding display issues on Firefox on Android

March 2022[edit]

Section Translation enabled for Javanese, Tagalog, Mongolian and Telugu Wikipedias
Better guidance by communicating publishing errors and warnings.
Cleaner language switching experience by removing unwanted space from language search results.
More reliable experience by avoiding the initial translation to load indefinitely and prevent errors when publishing.
Resolved long-standing issues on Content Translation about persistence of templates/references across sessions, avoid translations by multiple users to be blocked for longer periods of time (improving its representation) and showing a specific dialog based on the type of reference.
Improved guidance in Content Translation by updating the percentage of unedited machine translation as the user edits the contents.
More solid experience in Content Translation by avoiding loading issues, failing API requests, and updating latest Apertium packages and libraries.

February 2022[edit]

Better separation of device-specific experiences in preparation for a persistent entry point on mobile by preventing desktop entry points to leak on mobile.
Improved support for templates by avoiding some infoboxes to be rendered as a table and supporting references with images.
Expand machine translation support with the deployment of Flores on six languages, including Occitan and Luganda which lacked machine translation.
Better communication of content quality by avoiding unnecessary comma in the percentage of modifications by the user.
More reliable publishing in the sandbox by ensuring that the invite to publish another section is shown and new article publication redirects to the resulting page.
Published results for research conducted with Thai Wikipedia editors.
More fluent experience by adjusting the interactions to expand and navigate the panel where the original sentence is shown.
Improved usage visibility by instrumenting the language selector entry point.
More consistent experience for using section translation on desktop by avoiding language selector to exit the mobile experience on desktop.
Cleaner experience when selecting languages by adjusting the spacing of the selector header.
Code health improvements by refactoring Vuex.
Improved translation support by keeping Apertium updated with latest libraries (apy, anaphora and recursive) and language pairs (Indonesian-Malay, Portuguese-Catalan, Polish-Silesian, Norwegian Bokmål-Northern Sami, and Swedish-Danish-Norwegian)

January 2022[edit]

Improved discovery by providing a new entry point when searching in the language selector and improvements in navigation and visibility out of beta.
More stable suggestions by showing again articles to expand, keep them available when navigating back from a selected translation, and support refresh to a new set of suggestions.
More reliable selection for the default target language based on the current wiki.
More fluent translation experience by ensuring auto-scroll is only triggered when needed.
Better support for references by previewing their contents in the mobile editor.
Cleaner experience by adjusting the translation actions visual appearance.
User research with Thai Wikipedia editors with recruiting, preparing testing protocols and conducting sessions.
Technical preparations for enabling a new translation service (Flores) with a client and API key.
More reliable detection of present articles in Content Translation.
Updated to latest Apertium packages for Swedish-Danish-Norwegian, Italian-Sardinian, Belarusian-Russian, Catalan-Italian, Afrikaans-Dutch and Occitan-French.
More standard codebase by adapting mobile entry point detection to the latest code conventions.

December 2021[edit]

More fluent experience by scrolling automatically to keep the sentence being translated always visible.
Section Translation enabled for Malayalam, Malay, Azerbaijani, Tamil, Bashkir and Albanian Wikipedias
More fluent editing by supporting to place the input cursor after a link at the end of the sentence.
More consistent experience by supporting mobile styles for templates such as infoboxes.
Improved publishing process by automatically connecting a translated article with other language versions on Wikidata.
Better suggestions by showing articles to expand and ensuring that a new set of articles is provided after refreshing.
Improved discovery by improving visibility and desktop navigation for the language selector entry point.
More consistent link styles in Content Translation after a regression.

November 2021[edit]

Better testing environment by making Section Translation in test Wikipedia to be available in more languages.
More fluent experience by selecting the language of the wiki as the default target language for the translation.
More solid experience for ContentTranslation on desktop by avoiding issues when loading of existing translations, ensuring icons for the contribution menu remain visible, and respecting partial blocks.
More reliable publishing of sections by avoiding edit summary leaking into the section title.
Improved performance by reducing the wait when comparing contents before translating.
Improved search experience by avoiding glitches while loading results, showing "no results" feedback only when needed, and keeping search context when returning from the confirmation step to translate something else.
More responsive language selection by showing the selector as a dialog in wider screens.
Better support for references by supporting basic editing support for references.
More clarity in suggestions by renaming their group in a more actionable way.
Improved code quality by replacing Grunt files with NPM scripts, use of more standard API specification files, and reduction of resource loader modules.

October 2021[edit]

Improved consistency by supporting the list of articles for later visually aligned with the desktop experience and listing all articles added regardless of their language pair.
Better section mapping by keeping a consistent order as the sections listed in the article and surfacing missing sections in the confirmation step.
More flexible language selection by allowing to select the source language as target, resulting in an automatic language pair swap (instead of preventing such selection).
More reliable language selection by redirecting to the target wiki when selecting a different target language to make sure it is possible to publish in the target wiki.
More clean experience by adjusting the depth of contents when reviewing the sections to translate.

September 2021[edit]

Better guidance by showing more clear empty states when searching for an article to translate and more specific messages when starting a translation depending on the sections available.
Better adaptation to multiple devices by improving the layout of the quick tutorial in larger screens.
More opportunities to translate by surfacing missing articles to create now that Section Translation allows to start new articles.
More opportunities to translate by allowing users to keep articles to be translated for later.
Better guidance by showing feedback (and gratitude) about the user modifications to a translation.
Better guidance by showing a loading indicator when searching for articles to translate.
Better support for references by avoiding some instances of reused references to disappear which was often affecting Wikiproject Medicine
Initial data analysis of wikis with higher deletion ratios.
Completed research plan and initial compilation of materials for the study about how editors modify Machine Translation
Better guidance in Content Translation by avoiding Machine Translation warnings to show too early before users had a chance to edit the translation.
Updated test instances with latest operating system version.
Codebase cleanup by removing support for old browsers.
Cleaner visual experience by adjusting the language selector search bar borders.
Section Translation available in Thai, Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa Wikipedias.
More reliable language switching experience by avoiding issues with previously unused source languages.

August 2021[edit]

Published user research report for the Section Translation entry point study.
Section translation now supports to start an article by translating the lead section, not just expand existing articles with a new section.
New entry point for Section Translation: direct access to translate a section. This enables external tool integrations.
Better mapping of sections across languages by ensuring sections always show as either missing or present when comparing two language versions of an article.
More clear navigation by supporting back navigation from direct links, avoiding unnecessary steps when publishing and when cancelling a selected article, and ensuring links opening in new windows work and are indicated properly.
More reliable support for identifying sentences when editing a translation and for sections when publishing to avoid errors.
Improved instrumentation by configuring the event platform and include necessary metadata.
Better mapping of templates with the generation of parameter alignments for more languages and specific fixes for Odia.
Expanded machine translation support with the configuration of Elia to support more languages and fix problems with specific language pairs, and updates to Apertium packages.
More predictable behaviour for Content Translation by avoiding issues when keeping a translation service as default, avoiding unintended scroll jumps, delivering notifications for deleted old drafts, and fixing server issues and timeouts.

July 2021[edit]

Communications with wikipedias with higher than usual deletion rates for translations, including top users and admins.
Update the used Mediawiki skin to follow more standard practices.
Investigation of timeout errors with machine translation.

June 2021[edit]

Section Translation now makes basic suggestions with more relevant sections as identified by user research.
As part of the "new translation" entry point, when an article is selected to translate (either through search, suggestions, or an external link) a confirmation step is shown.

May 2021[edit]

Language undo tooltip now works on pages without language settings element and does not cause a JavaScript error.
Reviewed unminified Webpack-generated code for Section Translation and reported any security issues.
Updated Apertium language pairs in Debian.
Created a custom skin for Content Translation special pages, we created a new skin named 'contenttranslation' to use CX Special pages.; It is now used with the section translation variant.
Section Translation no longer defaults to adding new sections to the end of the article; it now uses smart default placement of new sections to improve mobile users’ experiences.
Updated the Suggestions List on the translation dashboard to ensure that translation states are properly represented.
As part of the "new translation" entry point from the Translation Dashboard, users can search for articles to start a translation of a section.
Using Machine Translation, Section Translation will have pre-filled frequent section titles in the section mapping database.

April 2021[edit]

Enabled the Content Translation as a default tool in Uzbec, Amharic, and Maltese Wikipedias.
Content translation provides users with suggestions of articles to translate; Based on user feedback, it would be useful to provide some general control about the knowledge area these suggestions are about.
Corrected an error that caused Machine Translation (MT) processing issues.
Completed user testing of Section Translation shortly after it was deployed to the first Wiki.

March 2021[edit]

Enabled SectionTranslation in testwiki.
Created and revised a research plan and brief for Section Translation Entry Points using feedback from Language Team.
Recruited research participants from the first wiki that Section Translation is deployed to, Bengali, and scheduled research sessions.
Conducted Section Translation research sessions.
Suggestions are now showing properly after changing the language pair in Section Translation.
Resolved ‘undefined index’ error that appeared for some users of the Section Translation tool.
Update Apertium to 3.7 release from upstream.
Simplified the Section Translation quick tutorial based on research findings to make the order of the steps more intuitive and text shorter so it’s easier for users to read.
Updated the “suggest” API and app so that users only see 5 suggested articles, making the feature more accessible to users with slow phones.
Updated the Special:CX menu so that each menu item appears on a separate line.
Explored ideas for Section Translation entry points: opportunistic (users find opportunities as they navigate content), persistent (stable entry points users can always find), and proactive (the system invites users to translate in response to previous actions).

February 2021[edit]

Created, revised, and tested protocols for Section Translation research on the first wiki.
Temporally hid parts of the Section Translation dashboard that are not yet supported on mobile so that users can only see fully functional parts of the workflow.
As part of the "Pick a sentence" step, users are expected to see only one selected sentence at a time, which can be highlighted in either yellow (if it has not been translated) or blue (if it was translated already).
Corrected code errors that caused Section Translation dashboard recommendations to not appear and the loading gif to remain indefinitely.
Based on UX Writer input, "Proposed translation from [MT service]" will be changed to "Suggested translation from [MT service]" on the Section Translation tool.
After successfully publishing the translation contents, users will no longer see a warning about leaving an in-progress translation to avoid confusion.
When the user applies a proposed translation, the text should be black to allow users to distinguish it from the untranslated content (gray text).
Bengali Wikipedia editors participated in previous research about Section Translation with positive results, and we want to enable an initial version of the tool in their wiki. This will allow users to experience how the tool works in a realistic environment without the limitations of the test instance and provide early feedback.
- Uzoma (our CRS) helped us make our announcement to the Bengali Wikipedia; we are monitoring the relevant talk pages for feedback.
Investigated how easy it would be to add Microsoft Translator API support in cxserver.
Users selecting a suggestion to translate may decide to go with a different one instead (e.g., after seeing the sections available to translate). It is now possible to return to the dashboard.
We plan to enable the Section Translation tool in one wiki to learn from its use with real content. Since the tool was designed to select any target language, users may be able to select a different language to publish their translation on. We investigated what happens when someone selects a different language to publish in order to avoid problematic situations.
Corrected when the user is in the "pick a sentence step" and selects a sentence to translate, clicking on an image no longer causes the browser to navigate away from the page.
Fixed bug that caused translations to not be published even after the user clicks the publish button.
Deployed Section Translation on the Bengali Wikipedia on 22 February 2021!
Adjusted the threshold for Vietnamese to prevent publishing when overall unmodified content is higher than 90%.
Verified that MT is available in production for Section Translation.
Enabled Section Translation on Bengali Wikipedia.
As part of the "Show follow-up options after publishing" step of the Section Translation workflow, users now get an invite to translate another section when they get confirmation that their most recent translation was published.
As part of the "Show follow-up options after publishing" step of the Section Translation workflow, users now get an invite to translate another section as they get confirmation that their most recent translation was published.
As part of the "Preview and publish" step of the mobile editor for Section Translation, users can preview their translation contents before publishing them.
As part of the "Pick a sentence" step (T251551) of the Section Translation mobile editor, users can select sentences that have been already translated to see information on the translation and an option to edit it.

January 2021[edit]

After the publication of a proposal for translatable modules, we evaluated the implementation efforts required and developed a plan.
Sent recruitment messages and communicated with possible participants to try to identify additional test users who match criteria our criteria (general level of experience with CX, language pairs supported by Apertium, openness to testing on mobile).

In order to analyze and visualize the Content Translation funnel, we collected the events that make up the funnel in collaboration with our Product Analyst.
Analyzed feedback from test users and prepared then presented the report to the Language team.
Enabled Content Translation in the Tsonga (ts) Wikipedia as a default tool.
Requested a campaign tag for Wikidocumentaries in Content Translation so that the link would work by bypassing default settings.
Fixed an error that caused link and template adaptation to fail sometimes (which prevented translating a given section).
Created a research plan and research brief for Section Translation’s first wiki; Also gathered feedback from Language Team and revised the plan accordingly.
Set user expectations by indicating that Section Translation mobile support is still experimental via a notice at the top of the translation dashboard on mobile.
As part of the "Pick a sentence" step of the Section Translation mobile editor, an option to select alternative machine translation (MT) options is provided.
Based on the input from the technical exploration, we explored design options to find a way for users to select a specific topic area to filter the suggestions.

December 2020[edit]

Updated the Wikipedia logo on the Section Translation testing server so that it is accurate.

Enabled content translation in Breton (br) Wikipedia as a default tool.
Corrected OpusMT errors that caused users to be unable to translate from english to Central Bikol.
Since Content Translation can now user Parsoid directly, other tools have been deprecated.
In Section Translation, VE is now preloaded which reduces delays for the user during translation editing.
Enabled Content Translation in Igbo (ig) Wikipedia as a default tool.
Enabled Content Translation in Sinhalese (si) Wikipedia as a default tool.
Enabled Content Translation in Asturian (ast) Wikipedia as a default tool.
Enabled Content Translation in Georgian (ka) Wikipedia as a default tool.
Improved MT support for Central Bikol by implementing the use of OpusMT.
Analyzed data and prepared a report on Multilingual Editors Experiences with Reporting.
As part of the Multilingual Editors Experience research, journey maps and small wiki personas were drafted.
Added validation for invalid titles in notifications, creating a workaround that logs errors.

November 2020[edit]

Increased standard font sizes from 16 pt to 18 pt for Mobile VE in Section Translation.
Created a responsive and mobile-friendly custom skin for Content Translation special pages.
Fixed mobile screen height so that the skip tutorial button is visible for all users.
As part of the "Preview and publish" step of the mobile editor for Section Translation, users can now publish their translation contents after previewing them.
As part of the "Compare the contents before translating" step of the Section Translation workflow, a sticky header lets the user scroll through the contents while the options to switch between source and target are visible.
Corrected code error that prevented a not logged in user from viewing some Translation stats pages.
Created the Section Translation test server feedback collection tool which includes messaging and guidance for participants as well as multiple feedback mechanisms.
As part of the "Pick a sentence" step of the Section Translation mobile editor, translators can now also translate the section titles within an article.
Language team’s OpusMT cloud instance was updated to the newest version.
As part of the "Pick a sentence" step of the Section Translation mobile editor, a card is now shown at the bottom of the viewport with the proposed Machine Translation.
An error associated with changing the target language of a translation was rectified.

October 2020[edit]

As part of the "Edit a sentence" step for Section Translation, translations will be loaded using the Mobile Visual Editor.
Analyzed roughly 45hrs of videos and transcripts from 21 different research sessions as part of Multilingual Editor Experiences in Small Wikis research.
As part of the "Edit a sentence" step for Section Translation, users will now be able to see the original sentence above the visual editor with options to paginate and expand.
Investigated cases where translations present unusually high deletion ratios or confusing machine translation (MT) statuses in order to understand usage and needs surrounding MT services and the content translation tool.
As part of the "Edit a sentence" step for Section Translation, a translation will be loaded with the Mobile Visual Editor, allowing users to edit contents in the usual way and leave the editor.
As part of the "Pick a sentence" step for Section Translation, users will be able to choose a sentence to edit.
As part of the "Edit a sentence" step for Section Translation, users will have access to the original sentence as they edit that sentence’s translation.
Adjusted the threshold for Vietnamese to prevent publishing when overall unmodified content is higher than 95% based on community feedback.
Corrected a language-data error that led to Compact Language Links not showing the Chavacano language as an option.
Corrected errors that caused "Section already present banner" to show up momentarily when the screen loads.
As part of the "Pick a sentence" step of the Section Translation mobile editor, users can interact with sentences by tapping on them and getting feedback.
Enabled Central Bikol in OpusMT labs instance to allow editors to check when we inform the community.
Enabled Content Translation in Oriya Wikipedia as a default tool.
Enabled Content Translation in Somali Wikipedia as a default tool.
Enabled Content Translation in Irish Wikipedia as a default tool.
Enabled Content Translation in Belarusian Wikipedia as a default tool.
Enabled Content Translation in Esperanto Wikipedia as a default tool.
Checked Apertium configuration for Serbo-croatian support and moved forward by enabling Google the machine translation default instead.
As part of the "Pick a sentence" step of the Section Translation mobile editor, the selected sentence can be highlighted.
Completed the Section Translation test server user feedback plan.
Analyzed videos and transcripts for Multilingual Ed X research sessions - potential editors.
Any project using GitLab can now opt-in to receive translation updates via Merge Requests.

September 2020[edit]

Fixed an issue where Content Translation fails to add translated pages sitelinks to wikidata.
Researched and drafted brief for the Machine Translation and Human Interaction project.
A document cataloging all the Machine Translation configuration options was created to make it easier on our users.
Visual Editor integration to the section translation project is ongoing after initial exploration.
Ladin (lldwiki) language wikipedia was added to cxserver.
Scheduled and prepped executive summary discussions with the Language team as part of the Multilingual Editors Experience.
Fixed a bug where adding categories was not possible when using the Content Translation tool.
Fixed a UI glitch when users used the “compare contents” option in Content Translation.
Completed the “Compare” step of the Section Translation workflow, allowing users to access the selected source section and the article in the target language.
Identified the steps/blockers needed to support test automation using Continuous Integration (CI) infrastructure for Section Translation.
Completed the workflow step for Section Translation that supports alternative machine translation selection options.
Completed the workflow step for Section Translation that allows a translator to see a placeholder where their new translation will be in the existing article.
Resolved errors that caused cropped text instances.
A detailed specification document to facilitate discussing Translatable Modules was written and published on MediaWiki.
Corrected errors that led to post-save operations for translation units failing on occasion.
Enabled Content Translation in Urdu Wikipedia as a default tool.
Enabled Content Translation in Welsh Wikipedia as a default tool.
Enabled Content Translation in Bashkir Wikipedia as a default tool.
Excluded testwikis and private wikis from ContentTranslation (CX) draft purge script and separated the CX database on testwiki.
As part of the "Compare the contents before translating" step, added support for opening articles was completed.
As part of the "Pick a sentence" step of the Section Translation mobile editor, section contents will now display so that users can navigate on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

August 2020[edit]

Investigated how to best apply QA practices to Section Translation as it uses a new vue.js-based architecture.
Enabled Machine Translation for closely-related languages based on community input.
Enabled Content Translation in Sundanese Wikipedia as a default tool.
Corrected errors that caused Cx2 to add unnecessary id attributes to elements that do not need them, such as numeric id values to tables.

Corrected code that lead to a syntax error while using Content Translation.
Recruitment for Multilingual Editors Experience research was completed.
As part of Phase 3 of Multilingual Ed X, many research sessions with new/potential editors were scheduled and completed.
As part of Phase 3 of Multilingual Ed X, many research sessions with existing editors were scheduled and completed.
Corrected code errors that lead to a Content Translation publishing failure in certain cases.
Provided section order information in the section suggestions API for Section Translation.
Updated Content Translation highlight colors to be appropriate for the background colors.
Machine Translation services supporting Chinese Mandarin were opened to closely related languages and variants to improve the users’ experience using Content Translation.
All steps until the editor are completed as Section Translation development continues.
Google Translate is now the default machine translation for Ukrainian.
Content Translation is now a default tool in the Assamese Wikipedia.
Content Translation is now a default tool in the Burmese Wikipedia.

July 2020[edit]

Confirmed resolution of a console error that caused some issues when loading the Content Translation page.
Corrected errors on Youdao MT that caused machine translation failure.
Completed building the UI framework to support the Content Translation dashboard and Section Translation workflows.
Created the API that identifies the missing sections between articles in different languages, a necessary component for Section Translation.
Resolved issues with user-added categories being ignored in development environments of Content Translation.
Completed the debrief guides for moderators to complete after each research session.
Revised some code so that Content Translation produces less log spam.
Users are able to change their interface language again when using Content Translation after resolving code errors.
Research sessions have started for Multilingual Editors Experience project, 7 sessions completed this week. Ongoing recruitment tasks completed.

June 2020[edit]

Completed a review process for the main tickets for Section Translation, reporting missing/unclear aspects that need to be better detailed in order to make the development process more efficient.
Context Translation is now in out of beta for the Galician Wikipedia.
Corrected default display setting so that article images in Content Translation dashboard are not blurred anymore.
Improved Content Translation's automatic template parameter mapping across languages in small Wikipedias by altering template parameters.
Content Translation is enabled for the newly created Awadhi Wikipedia.
Corrected the issue causing Content Translation’s beta feature to not always be automatically enabled when starting a new translation.
Re-aligned UI elements so that the Content Translation dashboard displays correctly.
Researched and wrote a research brief for Multilingual Editor Experiences’ to help inform the Design and Development teams’ decisions
A paper co-authored by Santhosh Thottingal and Jorg Tiedemann (Department of Digital Humanities, University of Helsinki) titled "OPUS-MT – Building open translation services for the World" was accepted for 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation and the proceedings are published (See page 479-480). It outlines the project and collaboration between WMF and University of Helsinki.
Created research protocol for phase 3 of our Multilingual Editor Experiences in Small Wikis research project.

Resolved an issue with Content Translation that caused the console to not display certain types of errors.
Set the dropdown list from select component to be empty by default, improving the user experience.
Restored Machine Translation to the Content Translation master server after a release caused it to malfunction.
Created a URL campaign for African languages for a COVID-19 translation project.
Content Translation handled an edge case where a known user was trying to translate a page which was already being translated by an unknown user.
Enabled Google Translate support in Content Translation for Kinyarwanda, Odia, Tatar, Turkmen and Uyghur.
Adjusted how Content Translation manages machine translation warnings with regards to mathematical equations.

May 2020[edit]

Enabled Content Translation in Armenian Wikipedia as a default tool.
Content Translation was tested on multiple servers to verify how it functions out-of-beta .
Adjusted the threshold for machine translation (MT) content for the Chinese Wikipedia to prevent publishing when overall unmodified MT content is higher than 70% at community request.
Enabled Google Translate support in Content Translation for the following languages: Amharic, Kyrgyz, Luxembourgish, Scots Gaelic, and Xhosa.
Added the Sakha language to Content Translation’s list of Machine Translation supported languages through Yandex Translation
Updated the CX abuse filter statistics script from MySQL to Hive
Reverted machine translation limits for the Chinese Wikipedia as a response to the community’s feedback.
Completed design specifications for Section Translation and its features.
Adjusted the machine translation threshold for Chinese Wikipedia to be 5% more strict based on community feedback.
Tested a neural machine translation service, MarianNMT, to evaluate its its hosting requirements and performance on our systems.

April 2020[edit]

Content translation enabled by default for Lithuanian.
Improved testing environment by fixing an issue that resulted in a corrupt repository.
More reliable section mapping in Section translation by preventing API errors.
More reliable publishing of translations by preventing that broken categories stop the whole process.
Content translation enabled by default for Slovenian Wikipedia
Better support for translating in multiple sessions by restoring access to unfinished translations
Updated the default machine translation tool to Google Translate for the Chinese Wikipedia at community request
Expanded monthly reports to include a more convenient way to monitor changes in Content Translation use by language
Complete design research report on section translation to validate the concept and design ideas
Completed a full design research analysis on Section Translation Sessions with Bengali, Javanese and Indonesian editors to help improve user experience
Investigated the cause of some missing interlanguage links for articles translated using Content Translation.
Improved monthly content translation analytics support by fixing errors that lead to incorrect change tags when articles are not published.

March 2020[edit]

Improved consistency by fixing a regression that affected the visual styles of Content Translation.
Support for community events related to translation by creating a url campaign for WikiGap to provide visibility to the translations created through it, and a survey to get the impressions about Content Translation of participants of events (to be initially applied on editathon on cybersecurity in India).
Completed the analysis for second round of research on Section Translation with Bengali Wikipedia editors, and conducted research sessions for the next round with Javanese editors. This completes the sessions planned for this study, being pending only the final analysis and results.
Improved template support by generating mappings for template parameters for our target languages using a machine learning approach.
Improved discovery with better detection of newcomers to show an invitation to translate.
Started the process to evaluate improving performance of OpusMT by geting access to a server for performance measurements.
Content translation enabled by default for Estonian, Azerbaijani, and Malay.
Published initial design ideas for Section translation entry points as part of the design exploration.

February 2020[edit]

Content translation enabled by default for Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, and Punjabi.
Technical exploration for the architecture to support Section Translation development (both on desktop and mobile) following the recommendations of the Frontend Architecture Working Group.
Better support for the Chuvash language by enabling machine translation support.
Content translation enabled by default for Bosnian and Macedonian.
Improvements in template support by setting-up a server instance to generate the mappings for template parameters following the computationally-intensive machine learning approach.
Integrated for the first time a translation service that is both open source and based on Neural Machine Translation in Content Translation (OpusMT). OpusMT has been enabled for Assamese to experiment how community translations could help bootstrap an open machine translation service (announcement and feedback).
Translation limits in Content Translation have been adjusted for Assamese to prevent low quality translations, given the experimental nature of the OpusMT translation service used for the language.
Translation limits in Content Translation have been adjusted for Telugu based on feedback from the community and the measurement of the current deletion ratios.
Content translation enabled by default for Basque, Tamil, and Swahili.

January 2020[edit]

Improved support for references by preventing duplicate references in the source article.
Update of testing servers to support the new parsing system.
Content translation enabled by default for Afrikaans, Icelandic, Latvian, and Nepali Wikipedias.

December 2019[edit]

Updated test server instances with recent technology versions as required by recent MediaWiki updates.
Enabled server support for Content translation in two new Wikipedias: Sakizaya (szy) and Mon (mnw) Wikipedias.
Support for the Wiki for Human Rights initiative by creating a URL campaign in Content translation.
More reliable support for highlighting sentences across original and translated content and preventing wrongly formatted duplicates of ISBN links.
Support for compatibility with the new version of the parsing system.
Content translation configured to be enabled as a default tool (out of beta) for newly created Wikipedias

November 2019[edit]

Content translation enabled by default for Albanian Wikipedia after editors request.
Better integrated invites for users to translate when creating a new article, showing a specific article to translate or a one-time general invite depending on the context.
Compilation of prolific translators in selected wikis to raise awareness of our initiatives and plan further research.
Infrastructure to set up a local instance of Oups MT based on Marian Neural Machine Translation.
Section translation research preparations: research brief, test protocol, and recruitment communications (participant screener, community messages, and direct messages)

October 2019[edit]

Initial design ideas and prototypes for section translation.
Started conversations with all selected communities (Malayalam, Bengali, Tagalog, Javanese, and Mongolian) with potential to grow with translation.
Improved discoverability by basic support for surfacing specific translation suggestion as an alternative to create an article from scratch.
Content translation enabled by default for Tagalog, Central Bikol, Malayalam, Bengali, and Mongolian Wikipedias.
Better guidance by encouraging to complete old translations with a notification after 3 months.
Expand machine translation by allowing external tools to use all language pairs even if restricted by their Wikipedia communities.

September 2019[edit]

Content translation enabled by default for Javanese Wikipedia (announcement)
Clearer entry points by removing redundant invite to translate.
Improved entry points with more reliable placement for the interlanguage links dialog and reduced performance penalty for readers.

August 2019[edit]

Improved discoverability by providing an updated invite to propose translating instead of creating an article from scratch, avoid unnecessary steps when searching for the article to translate, and surfacing the persistent entry points in a more reliable way using global preferences.
Improved suggestions by surfacing suggestions as the default view when users are not working on any translation already, making it possible to link to any specific view in the dashboard, providing smarter services to find potential source articles for a given title in another language and potential translators, and use a more clear visual metaphor to keep suggestions for later.
Better control for users to keep suggestions for later by keeping the "for later" list visible for all languages.
Exposing better content gaps by showing the suggestions view by default when the user has no in-progress translations.

July 2019[edit]

Better support for exposing the tool as default by supporting settings to disable the entry points for wikis where the tool is out of beta.
Better guidance for users by showing an invite to try the main entry point to those users that discovered the tool through a non-persistent invite so that they learn how to find the tool the next time.