[Foundation-l] Push translation

[Ting Chen]

  Hello all,

I am a heavy translator on WikiMedia projects. I would say more than 95% 
of my contributions on content is translation. But I am against a blind 
translation. For example mostly I would translate british or north 
american related content from en-wp to zh-wp, and not from other 
languages. I would translate german or general european related articles 
mostly from de-wp to zh-wp. French related articles I try to translate 
from fr-wp to zh-wp, mostly I would make a test beforehand that the 
language in the article is enough comprehensible for me, since my French 
is by far not on the lever of my German or English. But I would never 
translate a Japanese related article because I don't think quite trust 
what the German or other english speaking people write about Japan. I 
never translate a China related article because I am very sure that at 
some point they have a not correct context. Even if there is no article 
in zh-wp about that particular entity I would rather wait a zh-wp user 
who has more understanding to start an article on it. (Or, ocasionally I 
would do research myself and start an article from scrap.)

Natural science related articles are sort of universal, although reading 
through different languages you can also find here tremendous 
differences between different language versions. I used to select the 
(in my subjective opinion) more better version (before 2006 more en-wp, 
in the last two three years de-wp or en-wp about half half), or I would 
combine both versions.

Backward, I would only translate China related article from zh-wp into 
de-wp, because I think the deficiency in de-wp in this area is the 
biggest. And some zh-wp articles, especially the excellent aritcles, are 
really very well written and researched and source. I don't see any 
sense to translate a German related article from zh-wp to de-wp.

Translation should never be blind. For example en-wp articles about 
american towns and cities could get very detailed, down to 
neighbourhoods. I mostly omit too detailed parts one because I would 
start to do original research beginning to invent Chinese transcriptions 
for the names and second I think they are not really interesting for a 
Chinese user. You can also find all kinds of failures in the original 
article, if you are doing a blind translation, in the best case the 
failures remain in the original article, in the worst case you propagate 
those failures into language versions that maybe have no resource to 
check those facts. For example in the article I am currently working on 
[[:en:Mumbai culture]] there was the failure that the city has three 
World Heritage (actually there are only two on its territory). Most 
failures are wrong links because of articles got moved or disambigged 
and the links didn't got corrected. For example in the article mentioned 
above in the section Cinema Multiplex was linked to 
[[:en:Multiplexing]], the correct link should be [[:en:Multiplex (movie 
theater)]]. Such errors are quite common.

Doing more careful and considered translation can help both language 
versions, more than simply doing a translation.

Greetings
Ting