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)

Hello. I was translating Alexandre Banza from english to portuguese and everything was fine. I went to lunch and when I came back, I opened the translation tool again and the translation is there, but it doesnt load. I tried to logout and login, reload page, etc, and the work done so far doesnt load. Every other work in progress loads, except this one.

What can I do?

Hello Tuga1143,

Sorry about this issue you are having with continuing your translation. A similar problem has been reported, and it is being resolved. You can track progress on this issue here.

Please let me know if the similar problem I mentioned differs from yours.

Thank you!

Hi @UOzurumba (WMF)

It is similar, but in my case I can translate any other article, and it loads. Any other article works perfectly, except the one I mentioned.

Thank you.

Thank you, Tuga1143, for pointing the above out. I will mention it in the bug report.

I was translating w:Right to a healthy environment into Hindi language in Firefox. I keep getting the error message "Automatic translation failed" for translating any paragraph and not when translating the headings. What can be the reason? How can I correct it? Thanks in advance.

Hello Lightbluerain ,

You are getting the error message because you have not modified most of the machine translation service's initial translation in some of the paragraphs. The automatic translation is only provided as a guide; therefore, you have to modify the initial translation to stop getting the error messages and be able to publish your translation.

The Initial translation limit is a quality check measure to ensure good use of the service and avoid low-quality articles since the automatic translation is intended to be a guide.

To see the error details, please click on the error notification on the left panel below after the "Automatic translation failed" error message. The details of the error message will help you understand what the problem is, as I have explained.

Thank you!

@UOzurumba (WMF), thanks for your response. I couldn't find any "panel" at the bottom-left side. I am getting the error message at the top-right side, and although it's clickable (my cursor changes when I hover over it), but it changes nothing on clicking.

Also, I think there is no issue with the translation limit. Last time I was not able to load the translations of any paragraph, but yesterday I tried it with a different page where I could load the translations of all the paragraphs in the page without modifying a single character of any paragraph. Today I again tried with w:Right to a healthy environment. Although I am still unable to load the paragraph I was on, I can now load the translations to the later paragraphs; but not this specific one.

Hello Lightbluerain,

Sorry for the mix-up; it is the right panel, not the left. I have tried it, and the same thing is happening. I have logged in a bug report, and you can track the progress through the link provided.

Thank you for reporting this.

Thanks for the report.

Hi. Tried to translate this article to spanish: Survival_sex

But the site will not let me post because it says it is possible I put spam on it like a link to amazon.com (Es posible que exista ''spam'' en tu traducción. Detalles: The text you wanted to publish was blocked by the spam filter. This is probably caused by a link to a forbidden external site. The following text is what triggered our spam filter: amazon.com). So I looked up the references, there does not say amazon in any part. Also, would not that have affected the references on the english article? Since I did not make the references but the one who wrote the english version did.

Please help me, I translated it completely, took 3 hours and a half of my time, I want it to be posted. If there is something that links to amazon just get it off, I do not care about that, I do not want spam.

You can try to find the link (Ctrl+F and search) and remove it. Otherwise, this is not directly related to the content translation tool, so you might want to ask the question at es:MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist.

I tried out what you said with the keyboard but could not find anywhere that bloody amazon link. Could you or anyone help and solve the problem so the translation won´t get lost?

If you open up the original article in the editor, you can see it is the second reference in the first paragraph.

Is there any easy way to just use the references from the page we are translating from.

Thanks for the feedback, @511KeV. References often use templates to structure their information. Unfortunately templates are defined independently on each wiki. Equivalent templates are connected through Wikidata, but a tool like Content Translation still needs to figure out which are the equivalent parameters across these templates to know where to copy the information. Content Translation tries to transfer the references and templates based on the available metadata but this is a process that is not always going to work since templates may not exits in both languages or have a very different structure or parameter names.

If there are frequent cases where the tool is not able to transfer across languages automatically, please share those and we can investigate further. The ultimate solution would be to have some global system for references and/or templates, but that would be a separate effort.

It took me three days to translate the voice from English into Italian and I have revised it at least ten times by modifying it in all its paragraphs in an Italian that cannot be improved, but the system does not allow me to publish it due to "too much unmodified text" . It is not mine problem if the automatic translator performs nearly perfect translations. Certainly this discourages users from translating, especially when the translation is not sent directly to ns0 but in a user sandbox to be further accommodated as notes are very often translated poorly. I had already reported the matter before but to no avail.

Hello good day. I'm new here and recently I finished translating my second article, but when I try to publish it the following error appears:

"The text you wanted to publish was blocked by the spam filter. This is probably caused by a link to a forbidden external site. The following text is what triggered our spam filter: video.google.com/videoplay?".

I tried to find the problematic link, but I couldn't find it ;(

Not related to the Content translation interface per se, but mentioning the article you were translating would certainly help to find the link.

I'm trying translate this article: Missile defense systems by country.

It is the second link in the "External links" section.

Thank you.

Hello, for some reason I cannot quite understand, when I try continuing a translation I had started earlier, it just loads... and loads... and loads until I give up. It's really frustrating, and it's not a problem with my connection, since everything else, on Wikipedia and elsewhere, works perfectly fine. I have the same problem both on the website and on the app, so I really don't know what to do... Llaaww (talk) 13:18, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

Hello Llaaww,

Sorry about the issue you are having with translations loading endlessly. Please, can you be more specific by providing the following information:

• Which article were you translating and to which language?
• Which browser did you use (Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, etc.)
• What error message are you getting?
• If possible, provide a screenshot of the problem for a better understanding.

Providing the above information will help me reproduce the problem to understand it and report it if it is a bug.

Thank you!

I am experiencing this problem in all languages and with all articles I have dealt with so far. I use Chrome and Samsung Internet for mobile phones and the Wikipedia Beta app, which by the way doesn't even load the suggested translations nor a preview of the ones I have started. I am not getting any error messages, simply the "loading" animation for very long periods of time (more than 5 minutes). I hope this can help with better understanding this problem and making the tool better for everyone. Llaaww (talk) 14:27, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

Correct me if I am wrong; you mean you used Content Translation in the Wikipedia Beta app. If the above is the case, there is no support for the Content and Section translation tool on that app. In other words, it is not supposed to work in that app. However, you can still continue your translations through this entry point.

That said, thank you for reporting this; it is being investigated.

That is only partially true: I have also attempted to use it via Google Chrome and Samsung Internet, again with no success.

Llaaww, please provide the article you are trying to translate and the language you are translating to. Thank you.

For example, es:Mariana BO, from Spanish to Italian, but I don't think it's a problem with just that article: same happens with it:Alan Walker (Italian to Latin), Marnik (English to Italian) it:Angemi (Italian to French). I've also attempted using the entry point you have me, but my started projects just won't load. Sorry I'm being a bit of a bother, I hope this will help others in the future.

I have the same issue while trying to translate it:Ozieri to Sardinian. I use Firefox for Desktop.

For weeks I can't resume a quite advanced translation of uk:Тютюнник Григір Михайлович in French. Please, tell me that it is not lost!!!

@UOzurumba (WMF) I'm getting 4 Javascript errors in terminal: Uncaught TypeError: this.targetSurface is null / Special:ContentTranslation:225:477.

I also attempted to resume the translation from a computer, using Chrome: no changes whatsoever. It refuses to load. Annoying.

Hello Llaaww, L2212, Louperivois,

Sorry about this issue you are having with Content translation. I have created a bug report for this, and you can track progress on this issue from the link provided.

Thank you for surfacing this.

Please add the ability to translate subtitles available on Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons; For example, translating English subtitles into Persian subtitles, etc.

When translating the references, the next block does not translate, it duplicates the references and I cannot continue translating the rest of the article. Is it a bug in the tool? I have had this happen with different articles.

Hello Moniquiña

Sorry about the issue you are having with references. Please can you provide information to the following questions:

• 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 your browser console. To open browser console: press Ctrl+Shift+j (or cmd+alt+J () on a Mac).

Providing the above information will help us know if it is a bug and file a bug report to get it fixed.

Thank you!

Hello UOzurumba (WMF)

When I had this problem (several times) I solved it by finishing the article in my workshop. - I usually traslate from Spanish into Galician or from English into Galician. I think it may be the Galician...

- I use Firefox

- I'm not getting any errors

Now I'm finishing the Tara Westover article (from Spanish into Galician), but I didn't have this problem with the references...so I don't understand what it could be. Maybe the bug has been fixed.

Anyway, thank you for your answer and if it happens again, I will let you know.

Regards

I didn't do anything, and when I clicked to translate :en:Nebojša Tower to Hebrew, it showed me some strange symbols (if you wanna know: it was with the google translate option; the symbols are before the ref). By the way, it's not the first time.

same as Topic:Vu3252t6joywqesa

@Euro know, do you remember the last action before the system showed you two emoji-Snowman? As linked by @Arlo Barnes, my case is very similar. Thank you for your input either here or at the link. Cheers, Omotecho

@Omotecho Nothing special; Only clicked on it (It's no matter if you change something in another paragraph, it's still will be shown).

By the way, it was also in one of the last few translations of mk-he pair (I don't remember the exact one).

Thank you, @Euro know, for your reply. So I find similarity that in my case, I only deleted one double byte character, then the error happened. Hope more cases will be reported so that we will have more cases to compare. Again, you are kind to reply, thank you. Cheers,