Talk:Content translation

Please provide feedback about the Content translation tool on this page.

We suggest checking the Frequently Asked Questions page first.

When reporting a bug, it will help a lot if you will indicate the following things:

• Which article were you translating and to which language
• Which browser did you use (Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, etc.)
• If you're getting any errors, please provide log from browser console if possible. To open browser console: press Ctrl+Shift+j (or cmd+alt+J () on a Mac).

In case you are familiar with Phabricator, please consider reporting a bug there.

See also:

• Frequently Asked Questions
• User manual
• Content translation/V2 - updates about the new version
• Content translation/Section translation
• Highlights of Content Translation software updates (until 2017)

Problems in Iban Content Translation

Hi, I notice several problems while trying to do translation using the Content translation tool.

1) References

The references don't show up (or in gray colour) unless you put something on it like a space. Compared to Malay Content Translation, the references just appear automatically (and in blue colour). Several templates, like cite web template don't work even if we link the template to the Wikidata database. During translation, one might need to add in the template manually to fix the issue and it could be so tedious.

2) Template

Some templates don't show up in Iban translation, although the templates exist in both languages. We have to manually edit the template right after the translated article is published, and it is not a convenient process.

3) Autotranslate feature

Even Iban is now in Google Translate, the feature is not enabled yet in Iban language. Although it is not t a major issue, I would appreciate if this feature is enabled.

I hope these matters can be resolved soon to improve the experience of editing using this tool. Song GK (talk) 05:27, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Full translation at once

Hi, I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but I'll try anyway. What can I do to translate an entire page (from English to Spanish, specifically) at once? Because every time I try to translate a page, I can only do it section by section. I ask this because I often see how other users translate entire pages in one go. Azozoalis (talk) 20:38, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Problem in publishing translated article

With greetings and respect, I have translated Hamid Mahmoudi's article into Persian, but I encountered a problem when publishing it and it displays the message "Translated by Google", even though I did not translate with Google. I would appreciate it if you could look into it. Thank you.Daniel lorano (talk) 22:24, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

same thing happans to me with other page יוסי 700 (talk) 12:40, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

Hello @יוסי 700 and @Daniel lorano the publishing problem you mentioned, is it related to this reported bug? UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 23:29, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

I AM HAVING THE SAME PROBLEM. Alenux1 (talk) 22:47, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Just a general remark: when publishing an article, the default should be "publish on your personal user page" rather than as "new page". You then can go through the page, and specifically the source page, for any errors. Only THEN publish as a Wikipedia page. Joostik (talk) 10:05, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Too many untranslated - all work goes to /dev/null

While I understand the sentiment behind limiting untranslated ratio but right now when the translation is good enough to create a draft on my page (since the visual editor in the translation engine makes extremely annoying and hard to fix formatting errors) it's not possible, and there seem to be no export of the source either, so the whole translation (which contained plenty of work since I had to read everything and fix translation mistakes) is lost (vendor-locked into the visual editor). There are limits of the translation, and the editor is annoying, but doesn't seem to be trivially possible to edit the source. All work lost. Never again. Grin (talk) 11:20, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

You can cheat by artificially lowering the uncorrected ratio by mass search and replace a common word (like a particle), publish to your personal draft page, then mass change them back again. Joostik (talk) 14:37, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Same problem here. I also solved by worsening the automatic translation, save it and rewriting it again. This almost doubles the amount of work. S.vecchiato (talk) 07:14, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

It's crazy. I've just translated an article from catalan to esperanto. apertium does'nt work at all. However I choose Google the tool first provides the unchanged text. I must ask a second time google to get a translation. And when I was finsihed checking the translation, I can't save my work because "more than 96 % was unchanged". I'm sorry but google works rather well. What can I do? Introducing errors to get out ? --Agloforto (talk) 06:48, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Remove all sources

Could you develop a one-click tool to remove all references? In some language versions, like the NL-Wikipedia, it is considered bad usage to simply copy all refs without reading them personally. Removing them by hand sometimes takes a lot of work, and if you forget any, the remaining references cause this annoying problem of you randomly skipping to the end of the text while working on it, and then having to search for the point where you were working again.

If anyone wants to keep the references they can actually read them (!!!) and put them back in the text.Joostik (talk) 14:32, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Automatic editing filters

I've been trying to publish my translation to portuguese of the article "Boots", about a poem by Rudyard Kipling. Even though I haven't added anything special other than what's on the original article, I can't publish my translation: the error message "Os filtros automáticos de edições identificaram conteúdo problemático na sua tradução. Detalhes: Conteúdo e/ou resumo indevido relacionado ao corpo humano" pops up. This could be roughly translated to "The automatic editing filters identified problematic content in your translation. Details: Improper content and/or summary related to the human body". I have revised the entire article - which isn't very long - and I couldn't find anything that could be considered improper. How can I stop the filter from doing what it's doing? Sbraatzz (talk) 17:47, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

Next button in the course study is not funtioning for me

After I've tried hands on my first translation, when I get back to the course to continue the "next" button is not functioning making it difficult to proceed with the course. Shahadusadik (talk) 08:40, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

I can't translate some sections

Greetings. I have a problem not only in one article, but in every article I try to translate from English to Georgian - it won't let me translate and/or upload any sections like "notes", "references" or "selected bibliography"; once I translate the headline of these types of sections, I simply cannot proceed. These types of translations are probably not supported from English to Georgian. Ninuc10 (talk) 13:29, 27 December 2024 (UTC)

Unreliable on mobile devices

On previews, interlanguage links are invisible in previews even with correct formatting, contradicting a purpose of translation itself. Furthermore, attempting to add any tag has a chance to display an introductory pop-up that cannot be closed through any of its buttons, forcing a refresh of the page. This leads into another issue: refreshing the page or leaving the tab inactive for just a moment sends the user to a “Continue translation” prompt; clicking this button leads to a loading screen of seemingly infinite duration, and another refresh reveals that any progress made by the user has been removed.

Please consider the addition of an autosave feature. SapphirePimpernel (talk) 22:37, 27 December 2024 (UTC)

Traducción A Different Kind of Human (Step 2)

Hola, estoy haciendo la traducción de un articulo y no me toma los cambios, cuando le doy a publicar el botón se queda en gris y no hace nada, después de esperar mucho tiempo volví a cargar la pagina y había perdido todos los cambios. Que pasa? como se soluciona?

Hello, I'm doing the translation of an article and I do not take the changes, when I give to publish the button is grayed out and does nothing, after waiting a long time I reloaded the page and had lost all changes. What happens? how can I fix it? Darkotico (talk) 15:16, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Lots of bugs with named references

Hello team and happy new year!

Once we've edited a reference (i.e. specify the language code of a source, correct mismatchs of parameters...), every single time this source is used more than once in the article, bugs are generated in the translated text.

Please check this example. 47k (2/3 of the article) needed to be removed from the generated text!!

This is very annoying, can you please check what's going on and correct it?

Cheers, Daehan (talk) 17:19, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

See phab:T203772. Jeroen N (talk) 22:35, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

Frustrating 95% filter when translating from English into Spanish

After having translated the whole article "Scotch marine boiler" (that was suggested for me to translate in my mainpage after logging in), i cannot publich it, because "Tu traducción no se pudo publicar porque contiene demasiado texto sin modificar." as some paragraphs have 95% or more automatically translated text nor modified. But the fact is: Automatically translated text is very good, so it doesn't need to be modified. So? How do we solve this? PabloKWiki (talk) 20:47, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

In a case where the automatic translation in the Wikipedia you are translating to has improved, making the current machine translation limit very strict. You can discuss adjusting the limit with the Wikipedia community in the village pump.

In deciding how strict the automatic translation should be, your community should consider different samples of the automatic translation as case studies and agree on a suitable threshold based on its accuracy and the extent to which translators edit the machine translation.

Once there is a consensus on the percentage of adjustment (e.g. 99% automatic translation and 1% adjustment), you can create a phabricator ticket like this one so that the WMF Language team can adjust the machine translation limit.

I hope this information helps. Thank you! UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 02:08, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Problem For Translate page

Hello everyone. I don’t know who is in charge for coding the Translate page on Wikipedia. But I wanted to send my message to the Wikipedia coders, and that is that in the Wikipedia translation system, the information boxes for individual persons (i.e personal biography box- see: Template:Infobox person) are not automatically translated, and it is time-consuming for Wikipedia users to manually translate and change the links one by one from English to another language. Please, could the coders come up with a solution for translating the information template boxes? Thank you. 188.210.118.137 09:17, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

It's unfortunate you won't let me publish

I just quickly translated an existing page from Slovenian into English, keeping all the existing links. It is frustrating that you won'e let me publish it Markofirst (talk) 22:57, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

Source page has been modified....

Again hours of work lost, because, supposedly, the "source page had been modified"...

It then completely reverts all my work.

Could you please, please disable this function? Please??? Joostik (talk) 18:53, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

No, please, NOT AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!! Joostik (talk) 10:24, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

Cant post

I read all of the translation and did the needed updates but still almost all of the automatic translation was perfect. Because of the limit I can't post. יובל ברהמן (talk) 11:10, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Section being positioned at the bottom

I did some testing with the section translation, and I noticed that they are being positioned at the bottom of the page. See https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arion_(mang%C3%A1), https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rappi_Rangai and https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson-Shell, I had to manually place in the correct spot. It is kind of weird, since when I clicked to see the full article in Portuguese, it showed me that it would be placed in the correct place. tewi (talk) 02:31, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

Hello @てゐ

Thank you for reporting this. Can you translate a section of another article to see if this issue still exists? UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 13:52, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

@UOzurumba (WMF) still placed at the bottom https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hataraku_Saib%C5%8D tewi (talk) 01:17, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Thank you @てゐ, for sharing this. I have reported this issue here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T386131 UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 19:46, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

why bother translating?

Wikipedia bot is telling me that it can't publish the translation of the page Fish pepper because it has 96% un-modified txt from the automatic translation, I checked the entire text (proofread) and everything looks ok, I corrected only a few words that are not used in spanish, why bother putting this feature if it wont even alloy the translation to be saved so others can proofread it also? it is disgusting, I will have to create the page in spanish myself. Gerardolagunes (talk) 05:16, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Failed to publish a translated article

Hello pros, I used this tool to translate an existing article from italiano to chinese. However the translated version was failed to publish, we didn't make any changes tho. Publish error says it require some high experienced accounts to act. BUT, the English and German version were successfully published by this same account just few days ago. Please help me with the solution, thanks! Ghettolied (talk) 18:59, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

@Ghettolied: Hello, new users cannot publish articles to the main namespace due to the community restriction on Chinese Wikipedia. I have added a template for draft submission, and you can use this template to submit your draft to experienced editors for review. Thanks. SCP-2000 (talk) 12:29, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

Appreciate it! But how can I get to that link and how can it help with my case? Thanks Ghettolied (talk) 08:52, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

I have a similar issue as Ghettolied, could anyone point to me where to find the template to submit a draft to experienced editors? Thanks in advance for any help Zxo.Hu (talk) 03:23, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

How can I send a contect I create to an authorized publisher to check and publish if the article is corrected?

How can I send a contect I create to an authorized publisher to check and publish if the article is corrected? Here is my question I have defined in the title as well Volkanapaydin (talk) 18:55, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

Spanish auto translation is great.. but can't be published

I was trying to translate from english to spanish and used the content translation tool. It works great! I edited a few typos but can't publish it because my text has a high un-edited content. Should I re-write the article using different words? The auto translation is pretty accurate and I'm not sure how to edit it more without changing the whole spirit of the article. I read about the percentage of edited text rule in another post and agree with it, but seems like we're missing the opportunity to translate more articles just because the AI is getting too good. Any way to go around this rule? Thanks! Eileen Collyer (talk) 20:26, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Issue with content translation, En to Heb, who can help out?

Hello I have been trying in the last few months to translate this article to Hebrew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_bath Using the tool Here is the link to draft I keep getting a spam notice Different note every time now it's this one saying לא ניתן לפרסם את התרגום שלך כי הוא מכיל יותר מדי טקסט ללא שינויים

Although I can't find any source in that name mentiond that it's spam website... soon 6 months will be gone and the translation that I have worked so hard on will be gone...Anyone would be able to help out with it?I use Chrome-- Tanx Laliv g (talk) 16:25, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

no translation block is added

Yesterday(14 February), while I was creating an article for the Rusyn Wikipedia, translation blocks stopped being added, and an error message appeared: "Automatic translation failed"("Автоматичний переклад не вдався").This issue affects all translators in the Rusyn Wikipedia LYTMAN (talk) 13:54, 15 February 2025 (UTC)

I get the same message when trying to translate to English. Looks like something's wrong with the tool. Ships&Space (talk) 17:56, 15 February 2025 (UTC)

I am facing the same issue when translating from English to Tachelhit (shi). The only work around I found was setting setting the default of the initial translation to "Start with an empty paragraph" in older articles I have already translated and published, Sometimes this works, and other times it doesn’t. -- AguzulH (talk) 10:38, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Cannot load hard text paragraphs for translation

Hello,

I have already sent a ticket to Phabricator about the subject matter linked here, but the long and short of the matter is that I cannot actually get the original/hard text from Portuguese to English in particular in order to translate the material manually. This seems to be occurring on any platform (I tried on Chrome, Edge, and now mobile), and I am unsure why that is. If anyone else knows as to what the issue is, that would be of great help.

Regards, PootisHeavy (talk) 02:37, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

Me too in English to Japanese environment. 秋山夕子 (talk) 10:04, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

+1; it has been almost one week since CX2 is not accepting jawp users to work on it. Since I do not rely on the MT part of this extension, the part I respect and enjoy the most are;

• aligning original text on the left and the translation on the right;
• templates are auto imported to the right window, and at times they require adjustment, as templates are not matched on wikidata as muc as CX2 wishes;
• Wiki text is not applicable on CX2, however, II can add formatting as I understand wiki formatting;
• Of course, adding page links, brackets [[ and ]] is a very tidious job if I am forced to do manually, which CX2 offers whenever I copy the otiginal text from the left window.

I am sceptical about the abrupt unfunctioning of CX2:

• Why is there no notice in advance, if the change is permanent?
• Where on jawp or meta, do we have a forum to discuss pros and cons?

Does the situation has anything to do with the past debate, either jawp shall accept CX2 or not? -- Omotecho (talk) 14:53, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

Hello @PootisHeavy, @Omotecho and @秋山夕子

This issue has been resolved; please confirm.

Thank you for your patience! UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 16:04, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

@UOzurumba (WMF), Thank you and your team very much for offering the hard work as always. Honestly, CX2 supports much of my translation work, as I often skip/drop sentences from the original language, and missing them in the translated paragraph is a shameful mistake...

CX2 saves my face and time very much. Kindly, and happy March 3rd or Hina-matsuri festival (; -- Omotecho (talk) 06:02, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

The “Automatic translation failed” error keeps appearing.

For more than two days now, all the articles I've tried to translate from English into Portuguese keep getting the error “Machine translation failed”, even the ones I've already started. I don't know why this is happening, but if anyone can help, I'd appreciate it. I don't even use automatic translation anyway, I just use the available “copy text” and translate by myself! Sucksfierro (talk) 22:15, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

@Sucksfierro,

This issue has been resolved. Please let me know if you are still experiencing it. Thank you for your patience! UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 15:57, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

hey my friend, the problem persists Sucksfierro (talk) 18:42, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

@Sucksfierro,

I just tried translating from en-pt and everything seems okay; please confirm. Thank you! UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 16:09, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

yesterday it wasn't working, but today it worked, thanks Sucksfierro (talk) 16:24, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

Still problematic

Last time I used the translation tool was some five years ago and I stopped using it, as it didn't work well. Even now the same problem persists. It keeps saying that my translations was not complete, no matter how much I change the translated text. I am trying to translate an article from English to Indonesian. Maybe it's better to do it manually. Meursault2004 (talk) 18:01, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

@Meursault2004,

The machine translation limit for idwiki is set to 70% based on the communities request some years back. In a case where the automatic translation has improved, making the current machine translation limit very strict. You can discuss adjusting the limit with your community in the village pump.

In deciding how strict the automatic translation should be, your community should consider different samples of the automatic translation as case studies and agree on a suitable threshold

based on its accuracy and the extent to which

translators edit the machine translation.

Once there is a consensus on the percentage of adjustment (e.g. allow 80% automatic translation and 20% adjustment), you can create a phabricator ticket like this one so that the WMF Language and Product Localization team can adjust the machine translation limit.

I hope this information helps. Thank you! UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 16:13, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. Meursault2004 (talk) 23:12, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Translation issue

Yesterday, I translated an article from Indonesian to English and when I clicked add translation, it appeared the pop-up "automatic translation failed". I thought this issue was just a moment, so I decided to try the translation on the next day. However, the same problem kept appearing. Apparently, other users also experienced the same translation problem as I do. Can someone fix this issue? Faldi00 (talk) 20:55, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

@Faldi00

This issue has been resolved. Please let me know if you are still experiencing it. Thank you for your patience! UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 16:14, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

I just tried to translate an article from Indonesian to English and the issue still exist. So unfortunate. Faldi00 (talk) 22:02, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Problem publishing the translation

 Done
Hello, I just finished my second translation, I'm new in here. I had two problems.

1) I cannot find a way to translate the reference list with the tool, is there a way to do it manually? or maybe they just don't show up but will be there once the article is published?

2) As soon as I try to publish it, this error message shows up:

"Los filtros de edición automáticos han detectado algún contenido problemático en tu traducción. Detecciones del filtro: Pruebas con caracteres gráficos y emojis, emoticonos y arte ASCII"

And I have no idea what emojis and so it is talking about. AbrilInon (talk) 23:33, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Hi, just to fill in: can you check the right column/your language side, and see small letters in square brackets between words appear, such as: sample text ^[1].

If it does, then the system will push through the references from the original language, however;

possible issue

The system shows you error messages such as: "the reference format does not match". It means the reference templates are not matching between the original/source language and that of your templates.

possible solution

I do not try to correct it on CX2 usually, as I have not discovered a swift way to mend. In stead;

• 1) publish to my User:Omotecho/sandbox/ariticle_title space.
  • To do so, change the publishing destination with a cog-wheel icon; it is located at the very top of the page, outside of the translation columns;
• 2) when all jobs are done on CX2, the system insists I will double check the far-right column on CX2 and clear the errrors;
• 3) there is a button to note the error is solved, and I push each of them if there are four error notices shown as "1/4, 2/4,...";
• 3) then I will publish to my sandbox, mend the errors;
  • errors example: on jawp, all "cite web" templates need _access-date=_, or the system tells you there is an error.

If the correction is difficult, as somebody to help you, or does your wikipedia have mentoring program? Kindly, -- Omotecho (talk) 06:25, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

Thank you, I am not sure if I understood correctly all the indications, as I am not really good understanding programing technical vocabullary, but I will try to do it that way. Thank you for the detailled steps! AbrilInon (talk) 18:05, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

翻訳を開始したばかりで、翻訳元の記事が更新されていないのに「古い版に基ずく翻訳なので翻訳しなおしたほうがよいかもしれない」というおかしなメッセージがでる。

イゾラド (talk) 06:47, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Hello @イゾラド,

This warning message usually comes up when a translation is "in progress", and the source article has changed (been updated, edited or reorganised). Once you go back to continue translating that article, it will let you know that your translation is based on the old version of the source article which has changed. Depending on how much the source article has changed compared to your translation, it will suggest you re-translate your translation to sync it with the source (original) new. This might be a bug if you think what I describe is not the case with your situation. You can provide the following information so we check to be sure it is not a bug.

• Which article were you translating and to which language?
• Which browser did you use (Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, etc.)
• If you're getting any errors, please provide the log from the browser console if possible. To open browser console:press Ctrl+Shift+j (or cmd+alt+J () on a Mac).

I hope this information helps you. Thank you! UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 14:22, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

Snowman emoji appears while translating

Two emojis, "☃☃" appears amongst a paragraph while I am working on the translation column (right).

• Pagename: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ContentTranslation?from=en&to=ja&campaign=interlanguagelink&page=David+Shifrin ;
• saved at 01:03, 4 March 2025 or earlier.

FYI, I remember the same phenomenon back in 2022 or 2023, before MinT was introduced. Does it have anything to do with the input system, which in my case en-ja on iOS? -- Omotecho (talk) 01:06, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Space

Unnecessary space before reference TrueMoriarty (talk) 05:42, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

Saving Work issue

I was unable to use the service at all when the administrators abusing of power locking my account unreasonably for a period of time, and my works in process were all forcibly abandoned at that time without any records be recovered. I suggest the tools should provide further optimizations such as record preservation and progress maintenance, etc. in case of unreasonable interruptions and the risk of interrupting of administrators no reason. Longway22 (talk) 13:39, 16 March 2025 (UTC)