Talk:Content translation/2014

(Previous threads were moved to Talk:Content translation/Specification.)

Feedback from the first deployment of ContentTranslation

The first release of the ContentTranslation tool can be accessed at: http://es.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Especial:ContentTranslation . In this release, the focus is on facilitating article creation between Spanish and Catalan. Users in other languages can also use the tool with some tweaks. Please provide your feedback through this topic and we will respond as soon as we can. A separate feedback page will also be setup for on the Catalan Wikipedia (link to follow) . Thanks. Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 14:27, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

Runab WMF: Feedback URL on Catalan Wikipedia: https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viquip%C3%A8dia:La_taverna#ContentTranslation_s.27estrena_oferint_traducci.C3.B3_d.27articles_de_castell.C3.A0_a_catal.C3.A0 Kippelboy (talk) 04:08, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

Kippelboy: The initial announcement on Catalan Wikipedia got archived. The information is now available at https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viquip%C3%A8dia:La_taverna/Novetats/Arxius/2014/07#ContentTranslation_s.27estrena_oferint_traducci.C3.B3_d.27articles_de_castell.C3.A0_a_catal.C3.A0 Pginer-WMF (talk) 12:58, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Do a second translation

Hi great project! Just a small bug or question. When a translation is published in my subpage, I can't find any "start a new translation" button, and if I use the "back" buttons of my navigator, they are useless. So if I need to start a second translation I need to paste the project URL again Kippelboy (talk) 04:07, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

Kippelboy: There's another thing that we quickly did, and it's to show a simple source article selector if you go to Special:ContentTranslation directly. Amir E. Aharoni {{🌎🌍🌏}} 15:24, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

The first entry point to the translation interface is a red interlanguage link.

Currently it appears under the following conditions:

• The Content translation beta feature is enabled.
• The user's interface language is different from the site's content language. It can be changed using the language selector gear icon at the top of the interlanguage links list or in the user preferences.
• The user is viewing an article that doesn't have an interlanguage link to her or his user interface language.

According to the plan, in the future there will be more entry points, and this entry point will probably be enhanced to include languages from geolocation, Babel, browser language (the "navega en català" campaign will be useful here), etc. Amir E. Aharoni {{🌎🌍🌏}} 08:37, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

IRC

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

What IRC channel does the content translation team use? Gryllida 11:30, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Content Translation is being developed by the Language Engineering team. The team is available at #mediawiki-i18n

You are welcome to participate there on topics related to language support, including translation. Pginer-WMF (talk) 11:09, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

ta Gryllida 16:55, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Something went wrong

Hi, since a couple of days ago every once in a while the Content translator doesn't work. When you click the Publish button: It says "something went wrong" : The problem is that they system doesn't give any kind of mistake code to report you. And the second problem is that it cleans the page (the translated edited version) so you need to start all over again. It happened today to me with "Antipasto". Don't know if you can check anywhere if there is a mistake code. and this only happens sometimes Kippelboy (talk) 13:32, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting this. Just to confirm, this happens on: http://es.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Especial:ContentTranslation ? Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 16:30, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

YES :P 47.63.48.199 (talk) 04:32, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Is it still happening? KartikMistry (talk) 05:25, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Not anymore since one week or so :-) Kippelboy (talk) 04:47, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi! It happens again. Every 1 day or so I try to do a translation and when I click publish system says... something went wrong. Right now I was trying to translate Agustín Arrieta https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agust%C3%ADn_Arrieta From Spanish to Catalan and happened again, so I couldn't Publish it.

Could you be more specific in "something went wrong" bug message so we can better report? :-) Kippelboy (talk) 14:09, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

404 not found

I was trying to do a translation from a mobile device (editing wikipedia on an ipad but with Wikipedia in desktop mode) and when I cliked on my Content translator link that I have on my user page https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuari:Kippelboy it says me "404 not found" because it redirected me to mobile version. I was in a public wifi in a bar. Now tried at home and works fine. Just send it fyi :-) Kippelboy (talk) 21:28, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

There was temporary hiccups at Beta Server yesterday. Thanks for reporting! KartikMistry (talk) 06:32, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

How to participate...

Detail was lacking about our usability testing process. Due to our focus on languages that we are planning to enable next, we cannot guarantee a short response time. Notes were added to both the "How to participate" and the participation form to avoid a mismatch with user expectations.

I followed the instructions to register (see 'How to participate') - around two weeks ago, yet heard nothing. ~ Llywelyn2000 (talk) 07:25, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi, I am not sure what went wrong here. The user account registration should work like any other normal wiki. Do you remember if you got any errors while registering the account? Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 08:15, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

If you refer to the usability testing sessions, we had about 90 requests for participation, and we have contacted about 10 users already. We organise testing sessions as the project evolve and we prefer contacting a small group of users each time. So it may take some time until we contact the volunteers that joined the list.

Our selection criteria is mainly based on the languages which we can test with the tool. With the initial release of the tool we focused on the Catalan-Spanish language pair, but as the tool evolves we'll be testing with a greater diversity of languages.

Note that we also provided a "try the tool" section with instructions on how to try the tool, and you are totally welcome to provide feedback using this talk page.

Thanks for your interest on the project. Pginer-WMF (talk) 09:03, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks; I suggest a note to that effect is placed on the Registration page. Llywelyn2000 (talk) 09:08, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion. That is indeed a good way of getting it noticed better. Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 09:50, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Makes sense. I added a note on both the form and the corresponding section of the project page. Pginer-WMF (talk) 09:50, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Can't italicize links

I'm using Chrome. Dianakc (talk) 18:43, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Hello, doesn't Ctrl/Cmd+i not work? The formatting toolbar is in development right now. Once its ready, basic formatting can be done easily. Thanks. Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 04:09, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Great Project!

Thank you boys and girls!!!! This tool will be very useful for all wikipedians. I have tested and loved it. I would like that this tool translate from english to other languages too, especially portuguese. Ixocactus (talk) 18:30, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

We are really happy to hear that. I hope the tool is useful for you, and feel free to let us know about any issue you may find.

Regarding the support for English - Portuguese, it is not currently supported by Apertium, the machine translation engine we currently use for Content Translation, so we cannot support this in the short term (we need support for it to be added in Apertium, or integrate an additional service that supports it).

We are constantly looking for ways to increase our language support, and it is very helpful to hear from speakers of the different communities the languages they request the most and the perceived quality of the translations provided by the existing services. So thanks for your input, and feel free to provide more feedback as the project evolves. Pginer-WMF (talk) 11:54, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello @Ixocactus we now have a new machine translation system - Yandex that can be used for translating into Portuguese from many languages. You can see it here: https://translate.yandex.com/ . We are hoping this will be helpful for users of the Portuguese Wikipedia. What do you think? Thanks. (Also cc-ing @MisterSanderson for comments.) Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 17:21, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

I think Content Translation is AMAZING, even without automatic translation (which appeared briefily, if I remember correctly, but was shortly removed). I was having LOT of work to write 20~25 articles/year manually, and now, with this tool, I can easily create 100 of the same, or greater, quality. This helps spread free knowledge much more!

For me, not having automatic translation isn't a major drawback, as not having suggested articles would not be too... Bugs are more concerning now! I already reported them in this Talk page. MisterSanderson (talk) 17:56, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi @MisterSanderson Thank you so much for your kind words and encouragement. We are really glad that Content Translation has been of help to you.

You mention that you saw machine translation being removed. So far we have never removed any of the machine translation systems that have been enabled. For Portuguese Wikipedia we have limited support i.e. we have machine translation from Spanish to Portuguese only and not for any other languages. We have seen many users translating from English to Portuguese and machine translation is so far missing in that pair, but that can be also enabled with Yandex. Please do let us know if you have seen any other problems which we may have missed related to machine translation support for the Portuguese Wikipedia. Thanks. Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 10:44, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Thank you very much for this useful tool. Acélan (talk) 21:52, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Redirects

I wanted to start a translation of es:Algebra exterior but the left side of the page was empty. After a while I realized it could be because the Spanish page was a redirect to es:Producto exterior. So, my suggestion is:

• Follow redirects when loading the content
• If that is not possible, do not show redirects when the user is searching for a title to translate (in the main page). Helder 00:55, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting!

We should follow redirects so that they are totally transparent for users. The team has registered the issue and we hope to get that fixed soon. Pginer-WMF (talk) 06:11, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Finding articles to translate

I thought I should mention that toollabs:not-in-the-other-language can be very useful for users when choosing an article to translate. Just set a language pair such as "es" + "pt" and a category from the first language Wikipedia, and you'll have a list of articles of your interest to choose from. Examples:

• Featured articles in Spanish to translate to Portuguese
• Good articles in Spanish to translate to Portuguese Helder 00:57, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

That is useful. We are working on integrating similar functionality into Content Translation in order to suggest articles that can be translated. Pginer-WMF (talk) 06:15, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

another engine

Pginer-WMF, can this extension use other engines? Сan we now take it and turn it on ru.wikipedia.org but adding localy translator yandex and/or google? Сунприат (talk) 22:33, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Yes, this platform was designed to support multiple translation backends. Apertium is just the first one. It is also designed to be useful without any machine translation service.

Before we can enable Yandex and Google, we'll have to make sure that their terms of use can be applied in our context. We also want to make sure that the service provided is of enough quality for each language and the editing community around it. Hearing from our users that they are interested in certain services is really useful, and we welcome more community members to provide us with ideas on the quality of those services for their languages.

We are also going to make sure that ContentTranslation is useful without plugged-in machine translation service, simply as a side-by-side translation editor. Some users have found it useful enough to create some articles in Polish and Hebrew, even though no machine translation is available for these languages at the moment (see Content translation/Published pages). Amir E. Aharoni {{🌎🌍🌏}} 00:34, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

terms of use - http://legal.yandex.ru/translate_termsofuse/?ncrnd=9824

Can developers try to config it for the Russian language in the wiki RU.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org ? In ru.WP now considering the inclusion of extension as beta-function (link). It looks useful, but there is no support of our language. Сунприат (talk) 06:19, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Clear translation

The message Clear translation (MediaWiki:Cx-tools-mt-clear-translation) is unclear for me. I would suppose that it clear whole translation. Maybe something like Clear section or Clear this part. KuboF Hromoslav (talk) 05:06, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

I also thought that this will remove all partitions translation. Сунприат (talk) 09:22, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

Pau, what do you think? Amir E. Aharoni {{🌎🌍🌏}} 23:49, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

Makes sense. I would suggest using "Clear paragraph".

Paragraph is the usual element, and although an image or a section header may not strictly fit in the definition, I thing it will work.

Highlighting the affected paragraph when hovering the translation actions would also help to convey more clearly which is the affected area.

I created a task to keep track of this issue. Pginer-WMF (talk) 09:00, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

Feedback from Portuguese speakers

Content translation has been already used to create some articles in Portuguese Wikipedia.

We want to hear more about your experience translating articles into Portuguese: the features you find more useful, issues you found or even specific articles you had problems with.

Feel free to share your feedback. Pginer-WMF (talk) 11:05, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Issues about translating Alpinia conchigera from es-wiki to pt-wiki:

Clicking on categories, left pannel, top, inserts categores on the bottom; the right pannel only shows the categories tha exists on both wikis; it would be useful to have the possibility to add on the right pannel also those that do not exist on pt-wiki

Could not find a way to add links to not existant articles on pt-wiki

The content of the ref section was blank

The overall translation accuracy is good, say, 80% of the content was fine, although the article was very short

Thanks. Lijealso (talk) 06:36, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

I miss a CTRL+Z feature to undo the accidental click in the "insert source text", which made me loose the text I already had translated. Helder 17:34, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

The Portuguese article should be linked to the English article (through Wikidata) automatically. I had to edit the language links manually. Helder 18:00, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

It adds some unwanted formatting, such as ids, classes, data- attributes, br tags, nowiki tags, Helder 17:55, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

I just remembered that after I moved the page from my user space to the main namespace, it displayed a Guided Tour which I think should have been displayed before the page was moved. Helder 13:12, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

My first test (John Barrowman from en to pt) was partially successful; the tool created the page as an article in the mainspace instead of creating it in my userspace, even though I got numerous notifications saying otherwise. Victor Lopes (talk) 23:14, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Interface language

Russian interface is only partially translated. Where do I complete the translation?

For example, in the "new translation" dialog, some words are in English and some are in Russian. Gryllida 00:39, 30 November 2014 (UTC)

Here: https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:Translate/ext-contenttranslation Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 12:36, 30 November 2014 (UTC)

Any way to migrate into this extension?

Like issues about "Migration to Flow talk page" (see here), I'd like to ask: Could we please write a script, so a lot of classical translation pages (e.g. the CheckUser_policy) and structured translation pages (i.e. via Special:Translate) will be a lot of title-localized pages? Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 02:59, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Hi, There is feature overlap between page translation feature using Special:Translate and Content Translation. There is no tool to do the migration or using Content Translation to translate those pages. We might work on migrating some of the features of Translate to Content Translation - but it is very early to promise anything since we are working on the basic features and getting the first version of Content Translation to production. Santhosh.thottingal (talk) 09:04, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

I am not sure I understand the question well, but for Special:Translate can be enabled external translator system as a source. At least in TranslateWiki is used Yandrex for translations from English to Slovak. KuboF Hromoslav (talk) 19:03, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

start translating button is grey

Hi, since a couple of days ago I've got some issues while trying to start a new translation. There is that new search box which says "search for source page" but when you fill it using "paste" it doesn't work. And if you reload the page it doesn't work either from then. Every now and then it works. It seems I do have some issues in "doing the search" -> the grey button "start translation" doesn't turn into blue so I can't use the tool. But it happens randomly (i've translated a couple of articles during the last days...can't find when it happens and when it works) Kippelboy (talk) 05:52, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

I've discovered why it happens: when you click "start new translation" it appears two languages selected by deffault (in my case, spanish to catalan) -> if you don't click the languages again to "re-select them" I can't start translating. Hope it clarifies it all. Would be great that, if one language appears as pre-selected, it actually is :-) Kippelboy (talk) 04:53, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting this. It has been really helpful to identify a couple of interfering issues.

We are tracking the following related issues we hope to fix soon: one about enablement of the button, and another about improving language selection. Pginer-WMF (talk) 10:59, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Testing not supported language pairs

In the section What if my language is not supported? is how-to for enabling language pairs not provided by default. Although, this trick doesn't work even for the example link (en->my).

I am going to make presentation of Wikimedia movement and lead a Wikipedia training at the end of this year and it would be great to be able present (at least in beta servers) functional translation from English to Esperanto (already in Apertium and in good quality). KuboF Hromoslav (talk) 19:21, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Did you see "The special page does not exist" error?. Currently Content Translation is disabled by default in our test servers as a preparation to get deployed in a real Wikipedia in future. However, you can enable it as a beta feature and continue using it as before. Please read this section to know more Santhosh.thottingal (talk) 09:08, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

I know about using ContentTranslation as a beta feature (I did some days ago) but it absolutely does not help because the real case, using machine translation for language pair elected by myself didn't worked for me even before moving CT into beta.

Very clearly: I can use the ContentTranslation system itself but without machine translation; and changing URL parameters does not help. KuboF Hromoslav (talk) 18:47, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Content translation provides two kinds of tools:

• Tools that are language independent (e.g., a side-by-side editing experience, aids for adapting links from source to target wikis, etc.).
• Tools that are language-specific (such as automatic machine translation or dictionaries). Those are available only for some languages, and since quality changes heavily from language to language, we want to work with the community before enabling them.

In the case of Machine Translation, we use Apertium (which provides translation support for these languages). From those, we are enabling a small subset for which we got positive feedback from the community.

If your language is supported by Apertium, you can provide us with feedback about the quality of the translations. That is really helpful to identify new languages to enable.

If your language is not supported by Apertium, we are interested in knowing about (a) good translation services (especially Opensource ones) that support your language, and (b) how is your experience translating without the automatic translation support (in order to find ways in which we can make the experience more fluent despite the lack of machine translation). Pginer-WMF (talk) 12:56, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Restoring cleared paragraph

First time I was looking for "Restore" feature after clearing paragraph for some time (minutes) and didn't found (only now). Maybe it would be useful to make possible "Add translation" into cleared paragraph like into a new one. KuboF Hromoslav (talk) 19:33, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

I think this is one of those situations where it is hard to anticipate the user intent. If we revert to the previous state when the user clears a translation, some users will have problems when trying to add text manually (e.g., because a low-quality machine translation). In that case, the translation would be getting in the way as the user tries to edit the text manually.

Your usecase is also totally valid, but when we have two conflicting usecases, I think that the safest option (to guarantee the least surprise) is to respect what the user did ad keep the paragraph empty.

Having say that, we can explore ways to make the "restore" feature more prominent, and pay attention to this specific interaction during our usability testing sessions to check whether our assumptions are true. Pginer-WMF (talk) 09:15, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Participants in release of the beta-function

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/status#2014-11-monthly - The inclusion of the Content translation as beta-functions in the main wiki is planned in the middle of January? This will be added in all languages of Wikipedia or first in only some of them (in this case, is there a list and whether it is possible to join them?)? Сунприат (talk) 06:56, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello, we will initially include the Content Translation beta-feature in a few Wikipedias (between 5-10). The languages have not yet been finalized but its quite possible that the first set of languages that were supported will be included i.e. Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese. Were you interested to participate for any particular language? You can also fill in this survey to help us gather feedback about the quality of translations available through Apertium - the machine translation service that is used in Content Translation. Thank you. Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 11:13, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

I'm about ru.wiki. It would be great to include it to us together with the first. Some participants would like to see it in our beta functions (discussion). I would prefer to observe the development on the really working my lang wiki, but not in other wiki. Yes, Russian is currently not in Apertium. But if it is not included as beta, we will not think about it. If this will be available, then we alredy will have something to talk/think about, maybe even coerce the work to create the necessary dictionaries. Yet it will not be in our wiki, situation will not move anywhere with our language. As it seems to me. Сунприат (talk) 17:31, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello, I agree that it is very important for the tool to be made available very soon to also improve the availability of the resources that can then be used with it. We will very soon start working on preparing the list for the next wikis where Content Translation can be included, soon after the first group. Thanks. Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 04:28, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello, I know it's a little bit late, but in Chinese Medical translation task-force has great interest to test this out. We tried this a few times but when the manual feature is turned off, we can do nothing... Shangkuanlc (talk) 17:22, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

delete drafts from dashboard

Is it currently possible to delete drafts from the dashboard? CennoxX (talk) 18:32, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Currently it is not possible, but we are working on it. I think it will be possible soon. You can track the progress of this task in Phabricator. Pginer-WMF (talk) 09:38, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

Testing not supported language through url

The page says:

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) :

http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:ContentTranslation?page=Australia&from=en&to=my

I use the link, it does not choose Burmese as target language. Instead it presents the popup having English as the source language, Australia the selected article and Catalan the target language.

(In fact I want to try it for English to Greek - 10% of el.wikipedia is already translated from english. But let's start without machine translation.) Geraki (talk) 08:16, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting the issue. This was a side effect or a recent change in functionality to support legal requirements - that the translator must go through source selector. And the source selector prevent selecting such manually entered, non-supported languages. I created a bug report https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T85333 Santhosh.thottingal (talk) 05:38, 26 December 2014 (UTC)