A few months back, the Language Engineering team of the Wikimedia Foundation announced the availability of the first version of the Content Translation tool, with machine translation support from Spanish to Catalan. The response from the Catalan Wikipedia editors was overwhelming and nearly 200 articles have already been created using the tool.
We have now enabled support for translating across Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan using Apertium as the machine translation back-end system. This extends our Spanish-to-Catalan initial launch.
The Content Translation tool is particularly useful for multilingual editors who can create new articles from corresponding articles in another language. The tool features a minimal rich-text editor with translation tools like dictionaries and machine translation support.
Development for the second version was completed on September 30, 2014. Due to technical difficulties in the deployment environment, availability of the updated version of the tool was delayed. As a result, the current deployment also includes some of the planned features from the next release, which is scheduled to be complete on November 18, 2014.
Highlights from this version
Some of the features included in this version originated from feedback received from the community, either during usability testing sessions, or as comments and suggestions from our initial users. Editors from the Catalan Wikipedia provided constant feedback after the first release of the tool and also during the recent roundtable.
Highlights:
- Automatic adaptation of categories.
- Text formatting with a simple toolbar in the Chrome browser. In Firefox, this support is limited only to keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-B for bold, Ctrl-I for italics).
- Bi-directional machine translation support for Spanish and Portuguese
- Machine translation support from Catalan to Spanish
- Paragraph alignment improvements to better match original and translated sentences.
- More accurate detection for the use of Machine Translation suggestions without further corrections, with warnings shown to the user
- Redesigned top bar and progress bar.
- Numerous bug fixes.
How to Use
To use the tool, users can visit http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:ContentTranslation and make the following selections:
- source language – the language of the article to translate from. Can be Catalan, Spanish or Portuguese.
- target language – the language of the article you will be translating into. Can be Catalan, Spanish or Portuguese.
- article name – the title of the article to translate.
Users can also continue using the tool from the earlier available instance at http://es.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Especial:ContentTranslation
After translation, users can publish the translation in their own namespace on the same wiki and can choose to copy the page contents to the real Wikipedia for the target language. Please visit this link for more instructions on how to create and publish a new article.
Feedback and Participation
In the next few weeks, we will be reaching out to the editors from the Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedia communities to gather feedback and also work closely to resolve any issues.
Please let us know about your feedback through the project talk page. You can also volunteer for our testing sessions.
Runa Bhattacharjee, Wikimedia Foundation, Language Engineering team
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