Content translation/Updates/31July2014

On July 16th 2014, we announced the deployment of the ContentTranslation extension in Wikimedia Labs. This first deployment was targeted at experimenting with translation from Spanish to Catalan. This is a report on the initial results and feedback over the past 2 weeks.

Notes

• 29 articles were published in the Catalan Wikipedia. The topics of the articles are as varied as places in Malta, companies in Italy, a river, a monastery, a political manifesto, and a prisoner of war. A full list (regulatly updated) can be found at this page.

• The Language Engineering team also started addressing some of the bugs that were encountered, such as issues with paragraph alignment and stability of the machine translation controller.

• The users had generally positive feedback about the tool. Most of the discussion took place in the Village pump (Taverna) of the Catalan Wikipedia. Here is a summary of comments:
  • Jey: I tried it it with Alberto Cassano. The interface is very accurate, I'd like to congratulate you. I miss the possibility to format the text while translating (bold, italic) and the translation tool comes and goes. Even though it was indicated so, it was not published to the Catalan Wikipedia, but to a draft page, but I suppose that it's because it's beta. It would be good to translate references and categories. I also have to edit the images, and to replace "Imagen" to "Fitxer" (the first word is Spanish code, the second is Catalan). In general very good! I like the message against machine translations. Congrats!
  • Kippelboy: Hi great project! Just a small bug or question. When a translation is published in my subpage, I can't find any "start a new translation" button, and if I use the back buttons of my navigator, they are useless. So if I need to start a second translation I need to paste the project URL again. (This was addressed by showing a simple source article selector when going to the translation interface without specifying an article. In the future there will be more convenient entry points to the tool.)
  • Arnaugir: In general, I think that the tool shows promise!
  • Xbosch: I tried the tool with several articles, and the truth is that it goes very well, the whole interface, and not just the translator, makes the process of porting an article from one language to another much easier. It still fails in long articles.
• Among the complaints were some incompatibilities with old versions of browsers, the inability to apply formatting to the translated text, the inconvenience of having to copy the translated article manually from the beta site to the actual Wikipedia.

Upcoming Plans

The development of ContentTranslation continues. Among the features planned for the foreseeable future are:

• support for more languages,
• smarter entry points,
• automatic adaptation of categories, and
• translation center - a central view that shows all translations and suggests more articles to translate.

Feedback

We welcome feedback at Talk:Content_translation