Research:Translatable Pages Research
Translatable pages allow the community to make content available in multiple languages, enabling anyone to participate regardless of the language they speak. At the same time, translatable pages are more complex to create than standard pages. The goal of this project was to better understand the challenges of people creating and updating translatable pages in order to improve the user experience.
Background[edit]
Translatable pages are a feature of the MediaWiki Translate extension. It is a feature that provides a managed workflow to create and update wiki pages on multilingual wikis (i.e. not wikis like Wikipedia). A contributor can prepare the contents for translation, thereby making it possible for translators to translate and keep translations up to date. For example, translatable pages are often used for product documentation (such as project pages) and announcements. Using translatable pages for these allows the community to make the content available and synchronized in multiple languages. This in turn enables anyone to participate regardless of the language they speak. Before this feature became available, wiki page translations were done manually using copy-pasting, and it was not possible to see what parts of translations were outdated. Nonetheless, creating a translatable page is more complex than creating a standard page.
Translatable pages require marking-up the translatable content, separating it from content that should not be translated. In addition, the system segments the content to paragraph-sized units and assigns a unique id to each unit. All of this adds a lot of additional mark-up to the wiki-text, which makes creation and updating translatable pages more difficult than non-translatable pages. This process is documented in the tutorial page with both written and video instructions. This tutorial page is a translatable page itself. Recently, support for basic editing of translatable pages was added to VisualEditor. However, it’s not possible to add new content, and the translation-specific mark-up is visible in VisualEditor and adds clutter.
Goals & Approach[edit]
The goal of this project was to better understand the experiences and challenges of people creating and updating translatable pages in order to improve the user experience. A survey was used to gather feedback from a range of individuals, including WMF staff and project volunteers, as well as those who currently used Translatable Pages and those who didn't, but engaged in similar multi-language translation work. Following the survey, a round of interviews was carried out with a subset of the survey respondents to learn more about the survey topics and gather specific examples.
Results[edit]
For an overview of results, please refer to the Survey Results Report. If you're interested to learn more about the topics and themes from the survey, please refer to the Interviews Results Report, which goes deeper into many of these topics from the perspective of Translatable Page users, including not only the perspective of translators, but also page content preparers and coordinators.