Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Translation/Allow each wiki and each translatable article to have more than one source language

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Allow each wiki and each translatable article to have more than one source language

  • Problem: Currently, the translation system assumes each translatable wiki is based on a single source language, and each translatable article must have been written in a single source language. On a wiki such as the Meta-Wiki, this assumption breaks down because it does not correspond to reality.

    For example, there is circumstantial evidence that ContribuLing 2023 was originally written in French, then subsequently translated into English because Meta-Wiki requires translatable pages to be in English. But the system presents the English page as source. This poses problems for translators because although English is in theory a much more accessible language, parts of the article are difficult to understand until they realize they need to and should consult the French page for clarification.

    Another example is Wikimedia Taiwan/The Chinese Wikimedia Open Meeting on the 2021 Foundation Official Action/Documentation. The true source article was about 50% English, 50% Chinese. What happened was the Chinese parts on the source page were subsequently translated into English, then on the Chinese “translation” (in reality only 50% of it is a translation) the English parts were translated into Chinese. Now the system claims that the Chinese page “is a translation”, which is a false claim. The system is mis-stating the facts, and translators wouldn’t know parts of the English “source” page are in fact not authoritative.

  • Proposed solution: It would be helpful to allow content creators to tag articles and individual segments as being themselves translations, and specify which “translation” page is in fact the true source. When translators attempt a translation the system would tell them the article or the segment was in fact not written in English, and if they could, they could consult the true source segment at, say, the French “translation”. This would also allow these translators to add useful documentation as they see fit.
  • Who would benefit: Content creators and translators
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T329944
  • Proposer: Al12si (talk) 21:00, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Note you can already specify arbitrary source language for translation at Special:PageLanguage, see also Special:Log/pagelang. However, it is currently not possible to have more than one source languages in one single page.--GZWDer (talk) 18:22, 17 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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