Translating talk:Page translation feature

What's the best way to copy a source page and its translations to a new title? Not moving but copying. Example: you want to copy m:Stewards/elections 2011-2/Guidelines (suppose it was translated with the extension) to m:Stewards/elections 2012/Guidelines and then adapt it. Compare the CentralNotice extension feature to "Create a copy of the banner" (clone it). Thanks.

There is no such functionality in the extension at the moment.

What happens if one disables translation on the first (source) page, moves all subpages in the namespace for string translation to the new title, enables translation on the new page?

A mess? At least you would no longer have translations for the first page.

A mess, yes, but does the extension explode? :-) I guess I should try.

I guess this is related: https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/internationalization/cards/205

What's the best way to use magic words? I read somewhere that they're handled well and looks so; for instance, if you want to localise templates and categories the simplest thing to do is using subpages, and when you do so I can't resist doing this, which if made on the source page would avoid translation of language codes (I know, you'd need also some ifexist, but a template to do so doesn't seem worse than the tanslate tag around the language code for usability). I know, I know, it's our attitude for insane hacks, but sometimes they're good after all. :-p

Also, I swear that I'm asking lots of questions because when I understand the feature better I'll help you document it, don't hate me please. :-D

I don't quite get what you are trying to do with that magic word. Can you elaborate the function/use case?

Yes. Siebrand told me that to use translated templates and categories we can add a subpage language code to their name and enclose it in translate tags (in the source page). But the language code can be added automatically on subpages, using that magic word, so translating it is useless.

Hmm. You can probably get it with some titleparts hackery because subpagename doesn't work everywhere. I think it's fine, but may reference templates which do not exist yet.

Something I've never understood and I still don't understand: why does this feature require splitting pages depending on their paragraphs? It creates a lot of additional work (many edits) and considerations (markup, internal links, how to split etc.), and I don't see many pages where you're able to "recycle" the translation of a single section. Concrete example: I've not studied how the page was split, but what's the benefit in requiring 104 edits at least to translate m:Terms of use?

I suppose this it is a result of experience. The bigger the portions are to translate, the less likely it is that they get translated or alternatively the longer it takes to translate them. Take this as a good example for a horrifying message in terms of lenght. I have translated about 1850 of the 1923 messages for EOL within two or tree weeks. This was several weeks ago. So far I did not feel like sparing the hour needed to do a decent translation for it. Probably EOL will have to wait another month. If they had split up the message, the translation would already be at their end. However, I am speculating here, but I am sure that reality is not so far off. Cheers

This works if messages are actually autonomous, not if they're highly connected (currently, even sentences are split if they're on multiple lines, as in the example). Usually translators, at least on Meta, will translate a page completely, or they'll translate half each (or similar portions), and the next translator proofreads, and so on; this way, they have to make dozens of edits and to remember very carefully how they've translated the previous strings or they'll make all sorts of errors. The first time I saw (here) a page to be translated this way, in many pieces, I gave up.

I understand that this is the way how the extension detects that a particular portion of the page needs to be (re)translated, the progress/status of the translation and so on, right? But perhaps this could be disabled on a page by page basis (it's not always needed). Ideally, you would have the possibility to edit the page as a whole (or as if you were editing it as a whole) while retaining those features.

Why would you want to use page translation feature at all if you are not going to split the page up?

You underestimate it, it's very useful in any case :-p ; why do you think that's the essential feature?? I really can't understand.

For instance, it manages the list of existing translations for a page automatically, creates a list of translation requests, it marks them as outdated when the source is changed, AFAICS (will) allow review/proofreading with appropriate tagging, can allow automatic selection of translation to be shown to the user, hopefully can be developed to fetch automatically translations from where they're performed to where they're needed (protected namespaces on Meta or even other wikis like m:wmf:?)... the current translation system on Meta is a nightmare, you know? Also, perhaps it's possible to develop some interface to edit the translation as whole as you can do with the source.

And just to be clear, I'm not saying the splitting should be disabled entirely, but that there should be alternative ways to deal with split pages/paragraphs/sentences and that the splitting should be controlled on a per page basis (think also of the old translations which have to be moved to the new system)... at least, that's my confused feeling.

(I'm being serious here, not intended as a joke)

You appear to have gotten so stuck in the horrific translation process that Wikimedia's meta uses, that you're not seeing the extremely high barrier to entry and the lack of overview anymore. Take a step back and compare... And most importantly: use it.

P.s. This does not count as using it :) (2 edits)