Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-11-29/News from Diff

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• I think translation should be taken with good care. In some wikis, there are bad machine translations and it's bad for Wikipedia development Thingofme (talk) 04:01, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
• This text is rather promotionally worded ("take translation to another dimension", etc.) For balance, should it not have included discussion on the en.wiki restrictions on the tool? AllyD (talk) 08:37, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

  Because English is the source language of the translation, so the translation problem is smaller than a lot of wikis. In some wikis, they have a higher restrictions on Content Translation Tool, like limiting 85/15% or disabling completely, like m:Special:Translate; or restrictions only for extended-confirmed users. Machine translation reduces the quality of the works and many articles in other projects have been deleted because of machine or bot-making articles. Example Lsjbot Thingofme (talk) 03:35, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

• This is a frightful and promotional article, about something that rarely works as well as promised. No one should be translating with tools as they should be consulting the original sources to see if text is actually verified and there is no close paraphrasing or copyvio, etc. You can’t do that with a tool. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:12, 30 November 2021 (UTC)
  • @SandyGeorgia: As suggested by @Thingofme: just above this, the problems translating into the English Wikipedia are not as strong as you represent IMHO - for various reasons. Different language versions have different standards. One of the big protections for enWiki in my experience is the stricter requirements for sources. If you're going to translate something into enWiki, you better have some pretty good sources in the original, minimum 3 to oversimplify. So, assuming folks respect our referencing requirements, only the very best of non-enWiki articles are going to be translated into English. Of course the "writer" should have a good knowledge of the original language as well. Given that there are a lot of non-native English speaking editors here with near-native English writing abilities, I'd encourage them to translate from their native languages into English, once they understand our standards - and using machine translation should be a pretty good time-saver. But, of course, just turning on the machine and plopping down the output as a completed article is not going to work.
  • As suggested above (once more) translating from enWiki into another wiki should be technically easier, but has cultural difficulties. Whether the article is about road construction, public health measures, or apple pie, their readers probably don't want an article that is completely from an anglophone POV and ignores their home country conditions. So they have other special conditions and rules. So machine translation these days is a good tool, just not a miracle method. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 05:18, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

    So, assuming folks respect our referencing requirements … you see the problem? And, even if they do “respect our referencing requirements”, plagiarism and copyvio (along with poor machine translations) are often the problem. Then, these machine-translated articles hit DYK, where there may not be reviewers who have the language skills to check, and it turns out that a) they aren’t reliable sources, or b) they are poor translations with errors, or c) they have too close paraphrasing or plagiarism. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:21, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

• Translation done well can be a highly-efficient way to amplify the impact of volunteers writing in one language, to quickly expand small Wikipedias, and to improve coverage of underrepresented topics on big Wikipedias. I have been very flattered in the past to see much article content I've written, particularly on the topic of Black Mirror, translated into several other languages. However, like those above I am concerned by the potential consequences of low-quality usage. It is a very dangerous tool if used even slightly wrongly: the person using it must have a good understanding of both languages (particularly the one they're translating it into); they must actually read the given sources; they must be taking care over all the normal things they would do when writing an article from scratch. These are the sorts of areas and content writing methods we see overeager Wikimedians causing large disruption in, and it can be very difficult to detect—as SandyGeorgia says above—because of the language barriers. — Bilorv (talk) 23:18, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
• If only we could use DeepL to traslate we would have better translations (from my experience, DeepL is really better than Google t.)Javiermes (talk) 03:36, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Doesn't DeepL need a license to use its API? It is good at making translations, in my experience, but I hope that they license it out to WMF at a low cost. Those poor IP users already have enough fundraising banners as it is. Explodicator7331 (talk) 15:20, 16 December 2021 (UTC)