I had a talk with Amir and we came to a conclusion that WikiGrok is more or less translatable. The key is to write well defined qqq statements.
1. "Do any of these tags apply to ____?" where the blank can be anything, person, place, thing, etc.
This is the trickiest part because the unknown word is in the objective case in English and looks the same as in the nominative case, but in other languages it may not be the case ;). We can ask translators to make this sentence as generic as possible if the unknown word may take multiple suffixes. For example, in some language the above sentence may take this form: “___ is described best by which of the following tags?”, which puts the unknown word into the nominative case.
2. If changes to copy are needed, are they needed for every language or subset of languages?
Although many languages are similar to each other, each language will have to translate the sentence in #1.
3. What do we do with 'Instance of' and 'original language of the work' tags? Should we abandon overriding them?
We should keep overriding these expressions and let translators know that our overrides sound more natural and they are free to override default Wikidata properties if they wish.
If we decide to translate WikiGrok, whoever works on this, please don’t forget to add Amir to the reviewers list of your patch. He said he’d help clarify qqq sentences.
Thanks,
Baha