Talk:Content translation/Documentation/Comparison with the Translate extension

Just wanted a place to add other places that do some form of multilinguality or translation:

• Wikidata has a number of places where content is multilingual:
  • labels, aliases, descriptions for items and properties
  • multilingual text as a value
  • Lexemes have senses with multilingual glosses
• Commons has a number of multilingual contents (but I don't know much about Commons)
  • Some of it uses templates where each parameter is a language (I've seen that on Meta too)
  • the structured data on commons seem to have potentially multilingual values?

It would be great if we could have a more comprehensive list somewhere and see if these could be handled in a more unified manner.

I'd love to have a more comprehensive translation system for Wikidata. Currently, it's aimed at single values and not at groups: It's convenient to translate a single label or lexeme using wikidata.org's native interface. But if I want to translate, for example, all the labels of airports in Canada to Hebrew, there's no built-in tool for doing it. I was told that the external tool Tabernacle can be used for this, but I found it very inconvenient. In theory, it can probably be possible to adapt the Translate extension for doing such things, although it will require some work.

For translating templates on Commons, there's the Translatable modules initiative, which has just started. At this point it's aimed at modules and not necessarily all templates, but in the future it will hopefully be enhanced to cover templates, too.

Structured data on Commons (SDoC) is largely the same as Wikibase, so if there is a good solution for translating multiple labels, it can be applied to SDoC, too.

So, with some work, all of the above can be covered by the Translate extension.

If the Translate extension's translatable pages technology didn't add so much of its own syntax to pages, then perhaps it could be used for Wikipedia articles, too, and the Content Translation extension would not be needed :)