Translating Wikipedia articles - Wikimedia-l

16 Dec 2021

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

-- 

Dr. Ziko van Dijk / zikovandijk.de
Autor von "Wikis und die Wikipedia verstehen"
"Niederlande & Deutschland": https://www.youtube.com/ZikovanDijk