Topic on Talk:Content translation

A feature that will allow for a language-specific notice to be displayed, perhaps in the sidebar, would be extremely beneficial. For instance, if the target language is set to Japanese, the tool would show specific notices in the right sidebar to remind the user of acceptable translation practices as defined by the Japanese Wikipedia's local guidelines.

I've seen something like this in the prototype, but unless I'm missing something, I've yet to see it in the actual implementation.

This feature request was discussed at jawiki's Village Pump. The Japanese Wikipedia has a quite specific guideline on acceptable translation practices (w:ja:Wikipedia:翻訳のガイドライン). Ever since this tool became live, we have been seeing a sharp increase in articles that do not follow them.

Thanks for your feedback, @朝彦.

When users start a new translation, there is an information panel which includes a link to the translation guidelines (similar to the one in the prototype). The problem is that it seems to always point to the guidelines of English Wikipedia (which I imagine that don't include the specific considerations for Japanese translations). I created this ticket for further investigation on the issue and exploring possible solutions.

We are also working on the system of warnings for Content Translation, so if there is some specific example of a translation guideline that is often ignored we would like to hear about it too.

Thanks!

Thanks for the question.

This is already possible by editing the page MediaWiki:Cx-tools-view-guidelines-link. (It can be done only by a user with appropriate permissions, usually an administrator.)

@Pginer-WMF: and @Amire80:, thank you for looking into this! I took a look at the phab ticket. I'll let the jawiki admins know about MediaWiki:Cx-tools-view-guidelines-link.

Pginer, the issue is not in the Content Translation tool itself. We just want to stop the proliferation of unedited machine translations done by plugging each paragraph into Google Translate. Machine translations into our language are always horrendous in practice. (See rant below.) Just an explicit reminder not to submit unedited machine translations would be of great help, not just linking to the guidelines.

On a broader note, since the tool allows article creation without even setting foot in the target wiki, the sidebar can be the only chance to let the user know about the rules at the target wiki. That's why I asked for higher message customizability tied to the target language in the OP.

<rant> We've seen negation not handled properly (reversing the statements' meaning), as well as improper honorific rank of speech, fixing of which is often more time-consuming than translating from scratch, because grammatical forms and vocabularies vary depending on the honorific language. A discussion started recently to set up a new criterion for article deletion rather than trying to edit-fix them, in an attempt to reduce the workload. </rant>

> Just an explicit reminder not to submit unedited machine translations would be of great help, not just linking to the guidelines.

We already do it. Submitting a machine translation without editing shows these warnings:

• MediaWiki:Cx-mt-abuse-warning-title/ja
• MediaWiki:Cx-mt-abuse-warning-text/ja

As for the rant—by all means, if it takes more time to fix a bad machine translation than to write a new article, delete it. Machine translation engines make mistakes. They are supposed to help the translator be faster—nobody should expect them to replace the translator. That said, with the “parallel corpora” system, which we are setting up this month, machine translation developers will be able to improve their software by looking at the improvements made by human translators—not just Google or Yandex or Apertium, but all machine translation developers who are willing to use our API. So in the long run Wikipedia's translators are helping to make machine translation better for everybody by simply translating articles.