Talk:Content translation/Section translation

Please provide feedback about Section Translation. We want to hear about your experience expanding articles by translating new section on your mobile device. You can try the tool at the test instance (you need to create a test account there). It is still in an early development but we want to share it early to hear your impressions.

For feedback on the existing Content translation tool, please check the corresponding discussion page.

I highly appreciate the effort to make content translation accessible for countless editors who don't have a laptop.

While translating on mobile, I am able to find sections to translate and publish. I understand this is a key improvement in mobile editing. However, whenever I select a section, I have to translate the whole section along with its multiple subsections before publishing that part. This is problematic when Wikipedians like me are accustomed to translating in small to medium increments which generally last for one or two paras before publishing while using laptop. This allows me to contribute whenever I find a little time in my schedule. Unfortunately, currently this is not possible when translating on mobile. Therefore, I would like to suggest providing an option to select subsections for translation, which would help mitigate this issue.

Thank you @Pavan santhosh.s, for your suggestion; I would like to point out that with section translation, you can save the paragraphs or sentences you have translated in a section (clicking on the "done" button on the top right corner saves the sentence or paragraph). You can return to the translation by clicking the "in progress" icon to continue the translation of the section you started at any time without losing the draft, and once you are done with the section, you can publish it.

Breaking it down so that people can publish sentences, paragraphs or subsections might be chaotic and can lead to fragmentation of articles that are disjointed in meaning and other issues. I hope this helps, feel free to ask me more questions about saving your translated paragraphs when using the Section translation tool.

@UOzurumba (WMF) Thanks for the response!

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T346333

When I try to translate -> Translations:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements/Frequently asked questions/565/fr which EN is -> "=== How to fix the coordinates displaying incorrectly near the languages button? ==="

on page -> https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Translate&group=agg-Desktop_Improvements&language=fr&filter=%21translated&action=page i get in the suggestion box from Mint ->

"=== Comment réparer les coordonnées qui s'affichent incorrectement près du bouton Langues ? Je suis là."

It should be ->

"=== Comment corriger les coordonnées qui s'affichent incorrectement à côté du bouton des langues ? ==="

where second "===" is closing the section title, and the left proposed "Je suis là." is a nonsense here. --Christian 🇫🇷 FR (talk) 10:05, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, @Wladek92 for reporting this issue; the ticket has been triaged. For things related to the Machine in Translation service (MinT), please use the MinT talk page.

Hi @Pginer-WMF, a wikipedian reported to me, when he start new translation, he isn't able to translate lead section. Section translation skip lead section and start from second section (i tried and same happend). He also told me he was able to do it before. Looks like this fix stopped working. Could please take a look?

Thanks for the feedback, @আফতাবুজ্জামান. I could reproduce the issue and created a ticket for our engineers to look into. Feel free to track the ticket for further updates or provide any additional feedback.

Thanks for reporting!

Thanks.

I'd like to report another thing. The same wikipedian told me, previously when he translated new articles, it used to automatically get connected to wikidata item. Now this doesn't happen anymore.

Hi Pginer-WMF, Thanks for fixing both issue.

I'd like to report another one. There is a problem with reference. When i translate a section and publish, reference doesn't get included. Previously it used to include. Please take a look.

The same problem happens also in Greek Wikipedia. It seems that the correction of the problem hasn't been checked in any Wikipedia.

It was working fine few hours ago, now its showing that "Machine translation is not available at the moment". MinT translation is working tho

Hello, I have been enjoying testing the section translation tool and found it quite useful to expand articles from longer versions in other languages. I have some questions about the messages being shown to the translator, though. Firstly, every time I start a new section, I am given two screens of greetings/advice. I don't think this is necessary. If possible, further development of the tool should remove them for returning users, or at least reduce it to only one screen to click through.

The other is a message that shows up as I have finished translating a section. It tells me that it's learning from my changes. Is this strictly true? I know that some of the language pairs I work with uses Apertium to translate, which is a bit of a pain to update and improve. I feel it would be better if the saving comment was completely honest. If it really is learning from my edits, then fine.

Anyway, thanks to everyone involved in developing this tool, overall it's working well.

Thank you, Ranveig, for your suggestion, it is noted. Yes, the translation service learns from the changes you make to the initial translations. You can find out more through this link: Help:Content translation/Translating/Initial machine translation#Improving existing translation services.

Making content translation easier to use for Scottish Gaelic is a really bad idea. The results are often nonsense, and the recent improvements in fluency mean that they are still nonsense but harder to spot at a glance. This will:

• make the job of admins harder by increasing the supply of nonsensical translations
• potentially add to the Google Translate doom loop where it produces rubbish which goes on an apparently-trustworthy site like gd.wikipedia.org and is then used to further train the tool in producing more rubbish.

People are rightly concerned about the ethical issues of ChatGPT producing hallucinatory nonsense. We've had this trouble with machine translation for Gaelic for years.

It does nothing but harm.

Please stop.

--~~~~

Thank you, CreagNamBathais, for your feedback; I want to clarify that machine translation support like google translate is provided to aid translators. It can only be published after translators have reviewed and modified the automatic translation provided.

Suppose the contents translated are below the standard in your wiki. In that case, we can explore increasing the threshold of the machine translation limit (making the machine translation limit more strict) to encourage translators to review their translations more before they can publish them. If the above is something your community would like to explore, please let us know.

If it is something you want, you can start by evaluating samples of initial machine translations and the percentage of reviews done to improve the translations. Based on that, you can tell us how strict we should make it in your wiki (for example: make the Machine Translation 15% strict, allowing only the publication of translations containing 85% of the initial Machine translation). We can adjust the percentage threshold to what works for your wiki, which will also reduce the admins' workload.

Finally, translation is an excellent way to make content available in other wikis (bridging the content gap). If some people misuse it in your Wikipedia, it does not mean everything about it is nonsensical. Likewise, people are writing poor articles from scratch; however, it does not make writing articles from scratch foolish or unacceptable. Therefore, it is unfair to restrict well-meaning users from discovering the Content translation tool and having the Section translation because of the few people misusing it.

Once again, thank you for your feedback, and I look forward to your reply on the way forward.

Do you seriously expect us to create documentation for the hypothetical user of Fy:? Of the something like 100 million Wikipedians, only some 10 are active on Fy:. Of this number 139 ever in all that time used your toy to create an article. Do you think that's 139 of the 10, or 139 of the 99 million and change? Can you get rid of that, please?

Pardon my curiosity, what is "Fy:"?

Fy: is the code for a Wikimedia project. Most likely, it would be for fy.wikipedia.org.

That specific project has about 10 active participant. Those, we, found the translation project interesting, but not something we'd adopt without knowing more. Since our only contact was someone who had trouble even communicating in English, never mind in our wiki's own language, the translation project was forced upon us, and as far as I know, each of us is trying to get it hidden as well as possible, so it won't bother us.

Hello! I tried translating an article into Udmurt, and I think the tool is excellent.

I'd like to see an option to edit bare wikicode text. Perhaps, that'd be a minor feature, but for languages as Udmurt that have quite poor automatic translation quality and require major editing, working with object like links or templates would be sometimes faster through wikicode.

Thank you for your work!

For some reason when I published the translation, the title is added as 2nd level heading. Can be seen from here https://ms.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bias_pengesahan&oldid=5650151

@Pginer-WMF: Sorry for ping, please take a look. Same problem also on bnwiki. https://bn.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=রাষ্ট্রীয়_জনতা_দল&oldid=6050680 This happens when you create a new article.

There is another problem. When you publish a section, SectionTranslation adds that section title twice, e.g. (notice == মুখ্যমন্ত্রীদের তালিকা == added twice).

Thanks for reporting @Tofeiku and @আফতাবুজ্জামান. This issue is expected to be resolved (more details in this ticket). Please, let us know if you are still experiencing similar issues.

Thanks a lot for your interest in the tool and helping to make it better!

In response to UOzurumba's message at [[:la:Vicipaedia:Taberna]], we have reached consensus that the Latin Vicipaedia will impose the following rule, similar to the rule on English Wikipedia. Content translation is to be disabled for anonymous IPs and for users who have not already made 20 non-minor edits to Vicipaedia. Please don't deploy Content Translation or Section Translation to the Latin Vicipaedia until this restriction is in effect. If I need to discuss this somewhere else, please copy this message or tell me where to place it (I will in any case copy it to UOzurumba). Thanks

Hello Andrew Dalby,

I have replied in the thread. Thank you.