Who designed these pages and this translation process?

I'm new here but I have been in translation business a loong time (both as translator as well as project manager) and so far I haven't had a project where I wouldn't have had more questions than here. First: What is there to translate? Where do I find it? Why is it not right in the menu tree?

The basic things:

1. Prerequisites for translation (user etc.) - that's OK
2. What to translate - zero points currently, I know I can find it somewhere but where? Where is the list of things that still need to be translated?
3. How to translate
   1. for Finnish: good external terminology + some wiki-specific expression, but a wiki terminology database would be better. However, no guidelines for phrases.
   2. Development information on how parameters or single words are used is insufficient - typical for developers I must say; if the line is not a full sentence containing only words (!), the developer must provide documentation on how the parameters or single word(s) are used - leaving it to the translators is not the right way, as it just leads to wrong translations or that the line is not getting translated at all. There are over 260 languages in wiki so it's simpler that one person (=developer) does the explaining when creating the line than having 260+ translators thinking about it and asking from other translators if they might have some ideas...

And you use Google translate as "translation memory"?? Using Google Translate is banned in Finnish Wikipedia because the results are totally incomprehensible... And yet we use this unreliable tool for translating the wiki software??

That's all for now.

> Why is it not right in the menu tree?

It's right there in the menu, click "Translation tool", then click "edit" on the wanted message group. Two click, it is too difficult? You can also use Special:LanguageStats/fi.

> What to translate

As I wrote above, You can browse easily. Or browse this. Pretty colorful and handy statistics. The red ones really begs for attention.

> terminology

I think it's the responsibility of the translators building the terminology database. We (hungarian translators) built one here.

> information on how parameters or single words are used is insufficient

Yes, You are right. Although it is not twn's fault, but the developers of mediawiki/extensions. Any user can add translator hints, although few MediaWiki developers do it. If you're really stuck with a message, please do not translate it, but ask for help on its meaning here, and someone will add the documentation for the message... It's done the wiki way.

> you use Google translate

It only helps. If one copy the google translation character by character, he/she shuld be kicked in the ass. But google translation often helps, and individual words can be copied instead of typing a lot.

2) There is actually two links on the sidebar, projects and translation tool, which both list all projects we have. There is Special:LanguageStats too like mentioned above, but it has some issues.

3.1) You can either do it yourself with Finnish team, or you can try organize all translators to collect list of terms. Then each language could just use at basis for their own work. You don't need to be a developer to do that. What comes to external tools, we are not aware of any suitable, nor do we have much surplus developer manpower to integrate them. If you can help us, great!

3.2) We are educating developers about i18n, but it is slow process and new developers join all the time. It really is up to you translators to raise any possible issues here to be forwarded to the developers if needed.

The quality of Google translate varies much from language to language. It is just like all the other aids, just aid to help reaching the final translation. You and I both know that there is no tool which makes perfect translations. As a translator here, you need to know what is good and what is bad, and ignore aids which are not helping you.

I hope you find that we have actually thought these issues and but considerable effort into them (message documentation, developer education, translation interface and translation aids). Maybe the issue here is that it's not immediately obvious we have done it. However, I think we have come pretty far with only one active developer (me) and two active staff members pushing and pulling translations, integrating new projects and all that kind of stuff (Siebrand, Raymond). Yet we support many projects and there is hundreds if not thousands of translators to keep happy (and I hope most of them are). Once again, all help is greatly appreciated.

For some reason this thread popped up again. Nedergard: have the issues you noted got any better or if there is still something we should improve?

I guess the thread popped up because of the minor edit by Siebrand…