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WikiLearn/Translation

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

What is WikiLearn?

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You can read about WikiLearn here.

Translating WikiLearn courses

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A 9-minute tutorial on how to contribute translations of course content on WikiLearn

Meta is used to translate courses created on WikiLearn.

When a course (source course) is selected for translation on WikiLearn, the translatable texts in the source course are exported to Meta-Wiki for translations. The source course can be in any language, and that language is considered the source language for that course. On Meta, translations will only be enabled into languages for which the course has been selected for translation on WikiLearn, since allowing translations into languages which would not be available on the platform would be a waste of volunteers' time. Course owners can be contacted to request enabling translation into another language.

Courses can be translated on the Special:Translate page. They are available for translation on Meta-Wiki as soon as the course is enabled for another language on WikiLearn. Translations made on Meta-Wiki are sent to WikiLearn via a scheduled job that runs periodically. The translations from Meta-Wiki go through a review process on WikiLearn before they are used for the live courses, as a measure against vandalism.

Questions & Answers

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How can I see the latest courses for translation?

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There is a WikiLearn dashboard of courses available for translation, which you can filter by source and/or target language.

Once you picked a course you want to translate, you can use the name of the course to select it in the message group selector on Special:Translate. NOTE: there is a usability problem at the moment.

Why can I not translate to a certain language?

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Courses can only be translated to languages for which the course has been re-created on WikiLearn. We do not want to waste translators' time by allowing them to translate to languages for which there will never be courses.

What happens to my translations?

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A periodic job runs on WikiLearn and picks up the latest translations from Meta-Wiki. These translations are then reviewed and approved on WikiLearn by the course creator, after which they are used for the courses.

How do I translate the video content?

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Courses on WikiLearn may have video content. Subtitles in the video content will be available for translation on Meta-Wiki. The name of the video courses will contain the text: type@video

Subtitles of the video will be broken into smaller sentences when they are made available for translation. They will be displayed in the order in which they are used in the video.

The Special:Translate interface is not really built for translating video subtitles, so here are a few tips to help make things a bit easier:

  • Do not treat the individual unit as a separate string to translate. Instead, these are sentences spoken out one after the other, so they should be translated as such.
  • The title of the strings contains the time period for which these strings are displayed on the video. Example: subtitle-3920-7450-3 means that this subtitle is displayed between 3.92 seconds to 7.45 seconds on the video. The translations that you submit will be shown for the same duration.

Why are there so many message-groups to translate for a single course?

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Courses in WikiLearn are composed of individual components. Each component contains strings that can be translated. The strings in each component are grouped together for translation. So if Course A has 3 components, and Course B has 2 components, there will be 5 groups available on Special:Translate for these 2 courses.

The courses are named on Meta-Wiki in the following manner: <Course ID>/<Language Code>/<Component ID>

An example of an actual course: Course-v1:Wikimedia+CS500+en/en/block-v1:Wikimedia+CS500+en+type@chapter+block@3a04e4e5f1e04055aa517013ca893317 where the course ID is Course-v1:Wikimedia+CS500+en, language code is en and the component ID is block-v1:Wikimedia+CS500+en+type@chapter+block@3a04e4e5f1e04055aa517013ca893317

We are working on improving the name of the courses to be more meaningful for translators.

Can I edit the source page?

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You can, but that would not have any impact on those strings in WikiLearn. Additionally, your changes would get overridden when a change to that course is made on WikiLearn. Hence, we recommend not making any changes to the source page.

Can message documentation be added?

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Yes, please feel free to add message documentation to help other translators.

Why are translations not marked fuzzy when source string changes?

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This functionality is currently not supported for Message bundles but is planned to be implemented soon.

Where can I see the translations that I've submitted being used?

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The translations are regularly imported into the WikiLearn online learning platform, and are visible to learners enrolled to the particular course whose content you translated.

What is that JSON that I see when editing the source page?

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We recommend not editing the source page. You can read why here. If you still want to understand what the JSON content that you see is, read on.

The Translate extension has a functionality to translate message bundles. Message bundles contain strings in key-value JSON. You can read more about this here.

Each component in the course becomes a single message bundle to be translated.

Where can I report issues or ask for clarification?

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The best channel is email to comdevteam@wikimedia.org.