Topic on Talk:Content translation

Via Preferences, heading Betafeatures you can switch on the Content Translation tool (CT) at the very bottom. [In Dutch Wikipedia that is.] With a mouse-over at Contributions one gets a menu with Special: ContentTranslation; I have prepared a number of English and Danish articles and translated the German article Reptiloide into Dutch Reptilian. So far so good.

However, when I tried to go the other way, the thing turned out to translate Dutch into Dutch if I specified nl→en or nl→de. No cause or reason was given; the thing worked somewhat, as categories and templates were translated into their English and German equivalents. I could not translate into Danish either, but at least that could be suspected because the mouse-over was missing on the Danish Wikipedia. Spanish did work in two directions. After a lot of searching I found a possible cause: according to User access levels, heading Extendedconfirmed I am still eleven contributions short of the right to use the CT.

Is there a good overview of the possibilities and impossibilities somewhere? Or can there be a decent error message at an early stage? I've been looking around for goddamn hours and still don't know where I stand!~~~~

Thanks for the feedback @B222

Automatic translation into German is not available as of now. We have been following a gradual process for enabling machine translation on different languages. Getting community feedback is very useful to move this process forward, and I mentioned your comment in this ticket to capture the request.

In the tool, once you add a paragraph, the "Initial translation" card should be showing a warning message ("Translation services not available for the selected languages. Why?") linking to this page with more details.

We'll keep working to expand machine translation to more languages.

Thanks for using the tool!

I remember vaguely to have seen such a message. But what you describe is topsy turvyish anyway - the language list should only show available language pairs in the first place.

Understanding how users use the tool is key: they will browse languages, look at a few articles, read a few of them wondering which article in which language would offer the best information and be nice to do. Then, after about an hour, they have made their choice. They click the infobox and hey it works somewhat, then the categories, hey that's nice! Then they proceed with the text and ow it doesn't work, next one perhaps? Only then one starts to wonder what's wrong and get this eerie feeling that they have wasted one and a half hour of their time because the developers had no idea how human beings use a tool like this.

Anyway I have read the page you linked and many more at nlwiki, enwiki, mw, dewiki and dkwiki, but none answered the crucial question: "For which language pairs will the Translation service work? The Dutch helpdesk didn't know the answer either so I have spent the best part of an afternoon and the next morning hunting to no avail for the most basic of answers. And no, the why question is not answered either. The page you linked brings up a lot of technical nonsense but no answers to such basic questions, it is clearly intended for geeks only.

Btw many services under the heading Machine translation availability do list nl, de, and en. One could reasonably expect the translation tool to work between all those languages.

But first things first: the tool itself feels like an early beta release and needs a lot of development work as substantiated in a post titled Feedback vertaaltool (in Dutch). I will be happy to translate it when Google translate will not do for you.

We work to expand the MT availability for more languages. MT is one component of the tool and the tool has been used even for languages where MT is not available.

The tool integrates different services that support different languages. Some MT services such as Apertium support specific language pairs, other systems like Google support all combinations. The only exception to the later are translations into English and German which have not enabled yet, but we plan to do (and the feedback requesting them is useful for that process).

In general, the tool has still aspects to improve. For example, templates are created independently in each wiki and it is not trivial to map them across languages. We made progress in automating such mapping in some cases and using the existing metadata, but that does not cover all templates. Despite those limitations, we consider that the tool is still useful. During the last year, 707 articles were created with the tool in Dutch Wikipedia with a deletion ratio of 8% which was lower than the deletion ratio for new articles created without the tool (22%) during the same period.

Thanks for sharing the feedback from the Dutch community, I'll look into it in more detail.