Topic on Talk:Content translation

Eiku (talkcontribs)

Hi, either my perception has changed or the tool has been greatly improved, but I now find it totally usable smile. However, I have been looking for a way to insert a template in the translation, but haven’t been able to find one. I notice that in this talk page, typing two opening brackets automatically summons a pop-up window helping me with inserting a template. The same thing in the Content translation tool could be just awesome (but I understand, of course, that it would have to look up the template in the target-language Wikipedia – maybe this is therefore more complex).

I am also wondering whether the translated segments go into a translation memory of some kind (I have mixed feelings about this), but I’m going off-topic. Anyway, thumbs up for your great job!

Pginer-WMF (talkcontribs)

Thanks! The tool is still in active development and it is great to hear that the improvements are appreciated.

Regarding templates, we definitely want to provide a better support for them (there is a ticket to track the work on that area). We also expect that as templates rely more on Wikidata, the adaptation across languages would be simpler.

Regarding the translated segments, for some languages, Machine Translation based on Apertium is used as an initial suggestion. For languages such as Catalan, where Machine Translation works quite well from Spanish, we have seen more translations and a lower deletion ration than other languages (view stats). In any case, automatic translation is far from perfect and its quality varies depending on the languages and the content, so we always provide a way or the user to disable it as well as encouraging editing it when a high percentage of unmodified machine translation is being used.

Eiku (talkcontribs)

Thank you for your answer! It is good that templates are already on the TODO list :-)

As for MT, I am always skeptical of it, but this was not exactly my question. I think a “human-fed” translation memory could be both helpful and harmful. Helpful in that we could have a tool not dissimilar to Linguee to look at how other content translators solved this or that particular translation difficulty ; harmful in that content translators would unconciously restrict their own liberty, feeling that they ought to translate sentence by sentence without adapting, merging, splitting or reorganizing ideas / sentences because they would know that their translation is being fed to the translated content database.

Pginer-WMF (talkcontribs)

That is a good point about the Translation Memory. One of the ideas we were considering is to use translation memory in the context of a single translation to improve recurring errors of Machine translation (more details in this ticket).

There was also a ticket about Translation Memory in general, but it is just a placeholder since many details need to be figured out (e.g., how to provide context of previous translations without cluttering the experience). So I agree it is a promising area to be considered carefully.

Eiku (talkcontribs)

Thanks for your very interesting answer. The T106602 (first one) seems extremely promising for MT users :-)

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