User:Sj/Design chats/Talk translation

Reminder: This is a wiki! Edit and refactor at will.

The most useful wiki translation tools help maintain translation links of articles across languages, and preserve translation memory to speed the work of futhre translators.

The next-most useful tools would support multilingual conversation. That means every comment in a thread or on a talk page would have its source language identified or inferred, and could be rendered in a desired display language.

Google Translate already provides a simple version of the latter, but has to be called on a block of text or an entire page.

Ideas

A simple version of Talk Translation might:

1. Parse a talk-page section into its components (e.g.: individual paragraphs), estimating the source language of each
2. Translate each from the appropriate source language into the desired target language, displaying this appropriately inline (say, in different font or colored text after the translated paragraph)
3. Evaluate this one section at a time, on request, to avoid taking forever for long talk pageas
4. Cache the resulting translations so that popular pages don't create an undue burden on the translation engine
5. Support editing/correction of the translations by community members. [this should work smoothly with the caching]
6. Support turning on/off the rendering of the translation.

Challenges =

• Where would translation wikitext be stored? One talk page could have 1000 paragraphs, each w/ multiple translations.
• What happens as the talk page changes over time? This will be easier for Flow talkpages than classic ones.

  Can we reuse part of current translation tools? Perhaps, when the first translation is requested, each component gets an HTML-comment UUID, which helps identify the page containing all translations of that component.

• How might this work with sidebar / inline annotations and comments?

design chats