Hello,
I would like to share some experiences with the Content Translation tool when I translated an article from German to English Wikipedia. There are issues that could need a movement wide discussion, especially: the use of references, and the use of automatic translation.
Links: About the tool: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation My article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autumn_Crisis_1850 (The subject is a conflict in the German history of the 19th century.)
1. Why use the tool at all? In general, I am quite impressed with the tool as it is now. It saves me the hassle to deal with Wikidata, as the link is made automatically. It also makes it easy to use the pictures in the original article. Sometimes, the tool even manages to translate an internal link to another Wikipedia article. (In many other cases, I had to do the linking manually, as "Otto von Manteuffel" was not recognised as the same person as in the already existing article [[en:Otto Theodor von Manteuffel]].) I also like that the tool saves my edits, so that I can continue translating another day without having to save the text externally.
2. What about automatic translation? I decided to make use of automatic translation, name "deepl.com" as this website does an excellent job (at least between the languages that I understand). The main reason for me is to save time: the website knows many English terms I would have to look up. It is not just about the terms but also the correct prepositions etc. Also: is it "campsite" or "camp site"?
The automatic translation, still, is not perfect, and I would never advise to use it without checking each and every sentence. You always have to read carefully the original paragraph and then the proposed translation. At that occasion, I consult my online dictionary a lot.
And, frankly, when I translate from a foreign language (such English) to my native language (German), I don't use the automatic translation but create the German text all by myself. My own wording may differ significantly from the original, because it is my goal to create a readable German article, not to preserve the original text with all its details and difficulties.
Usual problems with the automatic translation of deepl.com are: * a strange wording, even the omission of whole words * a misunderstanding of the original text; for example, the original German article in this case dealt with the "Confederation" and the "Union" in Germany 1850, and deepl.com at one occasion wrote "Confederation" where it should have been "Union" * Deepl.com does not always recognize proper scientific terms. Also, in some cases, the German term differs from the usual one in English, e.g. the "German Dualism" is usually called the "Austrian-Prussian rivalry" in English. * Deepl.com sometimes translated "Kurhessen" to "Kurhessen", in other cases to "Electoral Hesse", in others to "Electorate of Hesse". All of these translations are correct, but I decided to use only "Kurhessen" in the final text.
So in general, I think that the translations from deepl.com are often astonishingly great. But you have to check them carefully.
3. Should we integrate automatic translation into the tool? As you know, many Wikipedia language versions do not allow for the use of automatic translation within our tool. The main reason: some people deliver articles without a clean-up. The result are unreadable or misleading new articles in, e.g., English Wikipedia. (In German Wikipedia, we call unreadable articles "Babel Fish accidents".)
But should the discussion end here? For example, we might want to allow automatic translation for those editors who actually do the clean-up. Why not giving the permission to editors who apply for the right to use automatic translation within the tool? Should an editor indeed deliver bad translations, the editor could still loose this right.
By the way, I made use of deepl.com translations by simply copying+pasting the paragraphs. Alas, I had to do this for every single paragraph which is quite a hassle. It would have saved me a lot of work if I was allowed to copy and paste whole article texts, or have an integrated automatic translation option.
4. What was the major problem when using the tool? The tool had a problem to deal with the references in the original article. The original article had 14 footnotes, and the tool indicated a problem with 3 references ("template problem"). I did not understand the problem because the article did not use specific templates for the footnotes. I decidede to publish the new English article anyway. - The result? All references lacked in the English article. I had to add them manually, which I found quite inconvenient.
We would need a unified system how to deal with references in general, for all Wikipedias. This system should be easy to use and allow an easy re-use in other language versions.
5. How good an article was the final text? Then, the English article needed some more clean-up: a line too much, a missing heading (my fault) etc. But that's okay. I also changed the English text by adding some information about the historical situation described. English readers may have less background knowledge than German readers, and German Wikipedia has some articles with additional information that lack in English Wikipedia.
Conclusion: Yes, I recommend to use the content translation tool (provided by the WMF) and automatic translation (provided, in this case, by deepl.com). It saves time. But the issues I mentioned prevent me from translating more articles.
Kind regards, Ziko