Topic on Talk:Content translation

I decided to try the tool by translating the simple disambiguation page w:en:DDB into Dutch. Although I encountered numerous issues I can see development potential in the tool. More about that later, but first things first, this is what I ran into:

1. Although I started with the English page and my home Wp is the Dutch one, the suggestion page showed me English > Español or the other way around.
2. I don't speak or write or understand Spanish so I selected English > Nederlands (Dutch) and clicked Start translation but —perhaps even less understandably— I got Nederlands > English.
3. And while I started from the DDB page the source page field was blank where DDB was to be expected.
4. After finishing I tried another page as a test. Now both language fields were blank where the source and destination of my last translation could have been used as convenient defaults. On top of this all translation suggestions were English > Español.
5. Where the English source version had internal links, the Dutch destination version showed grayed text, so I assumed the tool would insert brackets around [[grayed text]]. No such luck or actually no such elementary functionality.
6. In the Dutch version I added a few lines not present in the original text so I added [[the link brackets]] with the keyboard. Infuriatingly the editor placed nowiki tags around them. Crazy!
   • The same with {{templates}}.
7. I couldn't find a way to switch from bulletted text to normal.
8. Although I didn't try out I suspect that manually adding bullets * or indent marks : would invoke the nowiki curse once more.
9. I could not find any way to edit category names or to add categories.
10. No preview! Had there been one I would surely have abandoned the effort.
11. The right column may hide functionality unbeknown to me but as far as I can see it is at least twice as wide as necessary. It should be collapsible anyway to widen the text columns.

All told, the translation tool bereft me of all formatting options and using it cost me much more time than simply copying the contents of the English editing window into the Dutch one. Moreover I felt annoyed by the result. Having to apologize to the Dutch colleague who cleaned up my work and explaining what went wrong will somehow be a relief.

Development potential

Many of the issues mentioned above should be easy to fix but it is only worth the effort if the tool gets functionality that is not easily obtained otherwise.

1. First of all it should be possible to edit both the source and destination page. In the Dutch version of the DDB page I added w:nl:Desiré Delano Bouterse and it would be no more than natural to add him to the English version as well.
2. The previous point leads one to consider the possibility to compare and cross-translate two existing pages.
3. When used for existing pages the tool could also be helpful to compare the coverage of any subject in different languages.
4. As I am fluent in Dutch, German and English and can read Afrikaans, French and Latin I would like to use several columns for source languages.
5. And of course the standard Wiki markup tools should be enabled.

I am well aware that these suggestions may cost a lot of development work but without expanding the functionality this tool will be doomed anyway which would be a pity. Feel encouraged to develop this tool!

Kind regards, B222 (talk) 21:33, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed feedback.

1. Unfortunately, we don't have a good way to know what is the people's "home wiki" or native language. We are currently making some changes that may make this easier; for example, we are gradually changing the Babel extension so that logged-in users would have a better way to specify the languages they know in a way that would be readable by other parts of the MediaWiki software. I also filed this particular issue as an improvement task in ContentTranslation: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164072
2. This is odd. Perhaps you selected Dutch in both "from" and "to", and then it automatically swapped them? It's just a guess.
3. How exactly did you start? By clicking the "Translate" link at the pop-up that appears near Contributions? Or by clicking a gray interlanguage link in the sidebar? If you click on the sidebar, then it's supposed to auto-fill the From field, but if you are starting from the top pop-up, then it will be empty.
4. This is, again, very odd. They are not supposed to be empty. They are supposed to be filled, as you suggest, from your previous languages. I'll take a closer look into that.
5. This functionality does exist, but these are not made into red links automatically. If this was automatic, many translated articles would be full of red links, which is not necessarily desirable. You can make each gray link into a red link by clicking on the link and then clicking "Mark as missing" ("Als ontbrekend markeren") in the sidebar.
6. Yes, because this is visual editing, and wiki syntax is not supposed to work. In the future, when we integrate Visual Editor into Content Translation, this will be possible. See the FAQ.
7. This should be possible to do using a toolbar in the upper right corner, at the top of the sidebar.
8. You suspected correctly :)
9. Yes, adding new categories is not possible. Content Translation can only auto-adapt categories from the source article. In the future, when we integrate Visual Editor into Content Translation, this will be possible. See the FAQ.
10. Since this is a visual editing environemnt, the article is supposed to appear similar to how it will actually look after publishing, so like in Visual Editor, preview is not supposed to be necessary.
11. It frequently shows useful information about links, machine translation, templates, and other tools.

As for the other list:

1. This is actually a piece of functionality in which I am interested very much as well! My current advice is to read and improve the source article as much as possible before beginning to translate, but I agree strongly, that editing the source article while translating would be very useful. I hope to make this possible some day, but this is far from being trivial.
2. What do you mean exactly? Two existing pages in two languages?
3. Yes, some day we shall get to updating already existing pages, but this is also a future non-trivial feature. I don't expect us to get to it in the next year, but hopefully after that.
4. Content Translation is not expected to have something like this any time soon, but you can try taking a look at this: http://translate.keeleleek.ee/wiki/Main_Page . I never used it much myself, but I heard that it has such functionality. You'll have to try for yourself.
5. See #6 above :)

Thanks for the encouragement and the understanding. As I noted above, at least some of your suggestions are already on their way, although it will take some time.