Wikipedia talk:Pages needing translation into English

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Differentiation between "needs translation" and "needs cleanup" messages restored

This is a belated (by one month) announcement that User:Novem Linguae and I have reversed the merger of the {{needtrans}} and {{duflu}} templates as necessary so that the message posted here for pages needing translation is once again "The language of this article is ..." rather than "The initial language of this article was ...". I addressed this problem earlier at the announcement of the merger at #Template:duflu merged to Template:needtrans, and again at #New template bug? and #Proposal to undo merger of Duflu and Needtrans. I plunged into it myself when I learned that the user who had merged the templates was unavailable.

@Mathglot, I'm noticing the section above, #More robust version of Needtrans. Did our update remove the functionality you'd added? Can you check whether it needs to be restored, merged into the current state of the {{needtrans}} template? Largoplazo (talk) 12:12, 9 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Largoplazo, thanks for the unmerge. Yes, it did, and it should probably be merged back in, as it resolved a problem we would see not infrequently at WP:PNT with messages such as, "the language of this article is kk" from people using the lang code (unsupported before my change) instead of lang name; the change accepted either one. I'll have to look at it at some point, but too busy now. If someone else wants to add it back before I get to it, feel free. In the meantime, subsequent to the rollback of this template, the doc page of needtrans needed updating, and I've done so. Mathglot (talk) 19:29, 9 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. Tweaked the code for clean display when viewing the template page itself, instead of seeing [[{{{pg}}}]] at the top. Mathglot (talk) 19:32, 9 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@User:Mathglot I've restored the ISO 639 functionality and updated the doc to mention it. Largoplazo (talk) 17:17, 10 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Fails test case 4d (e.g., |language=zz ) which I thought was working previously, but tested it using old rev. 1007176726 and it fails there, too, so looks like your code restoration was perfect, and there was an outstanding bug that hadn't been noticed before. I don't think it's a very serious one, so just noting it here for the record so it can be addressed eventually. Mathglot (talk) 20:43, 10 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Latest needtrans template links the original article, please report any issues

I've just released a new version of {{Needtrans}} (it's called 'Translation request' now, but I'm still used to the old name) and it automatically links the original language article if it can find it. No changes to params, no change to what users need to do; it either just works and links it if it finds it, and if not it looks as before. If you notice any problems with it, please let me know either here, or at Template talk:Needtrans. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 04:30, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There is one issue: subst-ing the template produces some squirrely wikicode, because a downstream template is not subst-protected, and needs to be. For a short while until this is fixed, wikicode readers will see unprotected subst code like currently visible in the wikicode underlying § A Monster in Paris. This doesn't affect the rendered page section and links, which are correct, only the wikicode. (Pinging Nikkimaria who will run into this if attempting to edit that section: pls be patient.) This should be fixed shortly. Interested editors can monitor this discussion for developments. Mathglot (talk) 22:22, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've fixed the substing issue, and replaced the original § A Monster in Paris section with a new subst, which should now look okay. As before, if any issues, please add them below. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 02:48, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Duflu still listed as deprecated in this page's instructions

Hey @Largoplazo. The instructions for this page state {{Duflu}} – deprecated; now redirects to Needtrans.. I think this may need updating, since as you may recall we restored this template. –Novem Linguae (talk) 10:17, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If I'm reading the Twinkle code right, all "Translated pages that could still use some cleanup" requests should use {{Duflu}}, and all "Pages for consideration" requests should use {{Needtrans}}. –Novem Linguae (talk) 10:33, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That all makes sense to me, thanks. I have noticed that sometimes a post still shows up on the "needs translations" section with a "the original language was" message, and all I've been able to think of to explain it is that some tool I don't know about is still confused. Largoplazo (talk) 10:41, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Awesome. If you're willing, I'd suggest updating Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English#Translation template usage to reflect this.

some tool I don't know about is still confused. You can check the history/diff to see if it has a Twinkle tag or some other automated tool tag. If so we can investigate further. –Novem Linguae (talk) 10:53, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tangential to this, is that {{Duflu}} still needs to be updated to link the foreign article automatically, as per this edit at {{Needtrans}}, as reflected in this doc change. Mathglot (talk) 08:42, 15 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal to deprecate speedy deletion criterion A2

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion § Time to get rid of A2?. This criterion relates to foreign-language articles that exist on another Wikimedia project Thryduulf (talk) 00:45, 10 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Upgrade to Duflu now links the foreign article automatically

A recent upgrade to {{Dual fluency}} similar to the one described above for {{Needtrans}} automates generation of the link to the foreign article. This means you no longer need to include the |orig= parameter, just the |pg= and |language= are sufficient. Consult the latest /doc for details, or just do what you were doing before, and it will still work. Mathglot (talk) 08:01, 23 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Note: {{Dual fluency}} would still benefit from a robustness upgrade to the {{{language}}} param, as detailed here. Mathglot (talk) 01:22, 12 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

When the problem lies more in the source article than in the translation

In the entry for § Ferdinando Marinelli Artistic Foundry, User:Justlettersandnumbers reports that "the nature of the problem lies more in the source article than in the translation itself". I run into the same situation not infrequently, and I wonder if we need a project page instruction to address this issue, and perhaps discourage posting here as a bad translation, if, in fact the problem is a bad or inadequate original. If the translation is good (by which I mean, faithful) but the article had defects of Notability, Verifiability, or anything else, then translating it well will likely not result in an article that qualifies for mainspace. In that case, it probably should not be listed here, regardless of translation quality. Mathglot (talk) 07:25, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The crux seems to me that different Wikipedias have different requirements regarding notability etc...you name it. So how would we avoid people posting here? Not every user is knowledgeable in the ways of the Wiki. Fwiw, I have been mulling over the possibility that we might expand A2 speedy deletions (and possibly prod deletions) to include "badly translated/machine translated articles whose parent article is on another Wikipedia". The alternative would be to quick-translate said articles and nominate for deletion. Lectonar (talk) 09:09, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Lectonar:, I could support an expansion of WP:A2. An example of this is at Draft:Contravention in French criminal law.Since many editors might not know the language in question, we might need to consider encouraging taggers to create a Talk section with a machine translation of the original, so it could be compared with the translated content in the article; perhaps as an excerpt of a few sentences, or a google document translation hyperlink of the foreign Wikipedia url, which could be a revision url from the date of original translation, so that subsequent copyediting at en-wiki to fix it would not obscure the similarity, and other editors considering the A2 request would have some evidence to go on, regardless of their language background. Mathglot (talk) 04:13, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Paid translations through OKA

Courtesy link: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Intertranswiki/OKA
Courtesy link: WP:VPP § Unnecessary delay in publishing articles translated for $$ by an NGO

For those who have not yet run into this issue, OKA (Open Knowledge Association) is a small, Swiss philanthropy that pays editors a stipend to translate articles of the editor's choice from one Wikipedia to another; mostly (but not exclusively) into English Wikipedia. This has been around for a few years, but recently their profile is much increased due to paid COI concerns. Whereas formerly, OKA-paid translators published articles directly into main space, now they publish into Draft space, after some Talk page discussions. There are various discussions about OKA extant, and one is going on right now at Village Pump. OKA has a WikiProject task force page here, with further discussions on their Talk page. Your feedback would be welcome at any of these discussions. Mathglot (talk) 21:50, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

When do we translate film titles?

Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English#Various_Film_Titles lists several Tamil films with a request that the titles be translated into English.

My thought is that if the films were marketed in English with a standardized English title at some point and have a reliable English source to confirm that, then it makes sense to use that English title for the page, disambiguating as needed.

However, if the film was only marketed with its Tamil title, then it does not make sense to me to translate the title; the page title would properly remain in Tamil. Even if some English sources provided a translation, that title would only (possibly) correctly be used if multiple English sources majority used the same identical English title.

Thisisnotatest (talk) 03:03, 28 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There is an editor who keeps requesting those, I believe as they work through film articles, there are many more with tags not currently listed. My general practice has been to try and translate them if they have an actual meaning in English, for example in reverse, "Despicable Me" would be translatable as those words will have translations in other languages, whereas something like "Wonka", being a name, probably wouldn't. However I'll be honest I don't know what the proper policy position would be--Jac16888 ^Talk 10:15, 30 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Why do we have this big blank space on the page now?

I tried to fix it, but got nowhere. Some template problem perhaps? Lectonar (talk) 14:40, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That's what I figure. I've been noticing it for quite some time. I close it up once in a while. Largoplazo (talk) 16:14, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. A spurious clear; now removed. If it comes back, that implies there is a substed template that has a clear in it; that would have to be removed in the template. It can't be {{Needtrans}} or {{Translation request}}, because they don't contain a clear, so the culprit must be elsewhere, if it returns. Mathglot (talk) 00:51, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have examples of bad automatic translation? Feedback needed.

If you have examples of bad machine translation that could impact accuracy or verifiability, it would be helpful if you could add them to Help:Translation/Machine translation errors. The purpose is to gather data to support a possible future guideline regarding the suitability of adding MT text to English Wikipedia and whether it should be restricted to users who understand the foreign source. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 06:25, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ukrainian - English translation: biodiversity and ecology

Hi all, idk where else to post this (any suggestions are appreciated!), but I am working on this article https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Space011/Turia_Poliana_Reserve&action=history

and would greatly appreciate it if any of you could add anything new to this, thank you in advance! Space011 (talk) 18:18, 30 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A perhaps strange idea...

...but as I am looking at this page getting longer and longer... do you think it would make sense to sort the entries by languages instead of chronologically? Might make finding something to work on easier. Thoughts? Lectonar (talk) 11:37, 31 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Lectonar, as far as finding something to work on, that was the intention of the § How to help section of the page. It offers two methods to find articles in a particular language to work on. Both methods are category-based, currently, and do not link to the PNT page entry itself, which is a disadvantage for any entry that has comments or threaded discussion at the entry, although that is a very small proportion of the total. (Otoh, all entries have section headings, and so could be directly linked to by some kind of process.) So, those methods are available, but are passive methods, as they are hard to find and require that someone go there to use them.

It is not strange to ponder how to reduce the length of the list, and I have long thought we should do something about that. Whether your proposed solution would help or not, I don't know. I suspect not, as we do not currently have a process in place that either measures backlog (other than roughly by ToC or page length) the way the Wikipedia:Database reports do, or that encourages reducing backlog, the way that, say, WP:AFC or WP:NPP both do. Another possible backlog-addressing process is to enable a volunteer sign-up, the way that WP:Feedback request service does, currently facilitated by User:SodiumBot. If I got a biweekly message reminding me about a French or Catalan page entry at PNT, I would be more motivated to help. I don't always respond to the Rfc invitations that SodiumBot places on my Talk page, but I sometimes do. There are probably other backlog reduction processes in use, as well.

And we shouldn't ignore WP:DRAFTIFICATION as one item in the process toolbox. I am reminded of Largoplazo's comment (in another context) that:

... [D]raftification really has changed the game, as most of the otherwise legitimate articles listed on WP:PNT, by the time I see them, are red links because someone's response was to draftify them.

I don't know if that is still true, but maybe if we all considered that, it would help.

I think having some process(es) in place would help, and I would be willing to participate in implementing some of the details, if someone would take the lead in organizing it. Once something was in place, I would probably be more active helping out at individual articles, than I have been lately. Mathglot (talk) 17:40, 15 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think draftification is a better solution than outright deletion, but for now we have always held the opinion that draft articles are out of scope for PNT. I see 2 püossible solutions to incorporate draft here: 1) Would it make sense to draftify all the pages that have been labeled as "machine translation". Or, 2), do we want draft articles appearing in PNT too. If we go with 1), we might see this PNT getting cleared up slowly. And Drafts which aren't worked upon will get G13 speedied after some time. I for one think 1) is the "cleaner" solution. Lectonar (talk) 09:29, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

WP:Afc has a more mature and formalized process than we do (ditto WP:NPP). I think it would be worth looking at what they do for machine translation, and consider emulating their procedures here as well. Although as we are really the group concentrating on translations and they are not, in truth we should be setting the model to follow on translation issues. Mathglot (talk) 10:27, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For Afc, not being written in English is a quick-fail criterion...drafts get moved to EN:Category:AfC submissions declined as not in English....which is actually linked from our main-page under "see also". That collides a bit with our premise that drafts are out of scope for PNT. Lectonar (talk) 10:36, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ooh, interesting. Maybe we should have a new section with a wider discussion about what we want to do with non-English submissions. Otoh, as the translation group, we should really take the lead on what to do about that, and maybe Afc could categorize their quick-fail into a category that would become one of our inputs, so that in effect they would kick those articles over to us. And maybe we should revisit whether we deal with drafts or not. Mathglot (talk) 10:42, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I actually wanted less work :D. Lectonar (talk) 10:53, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Translation review

As one part of the process, would we want to establish a translation review, the way NPP or Afc do? As an example see § Guayaquil Pride on the project page. This entry was added 4 June 2025, and an editor improved the article and removed the {{Rough translation}} banner on 26 June (diff).

What should happen now? Do we take their word for it, and just remove the entry from PNT? Do we consider this as functionally equivalent to an Afc submit, which triggers a review by PNT volunteers? I would vote for the latter, but there may be other possible paths. Mathglot (talk) 19:33, 15 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Other than that tagging mechanically with {{Rough translation}} is accompanied by a report on WP:PNT, it's a maintenance tag like {{Cleanup}} or {{Copy edit}} or {{Manual}}. When someone fixes up on article to address one of those tags, they'll generally remove the tag at the end and that's it, no one's double-checking their work. Is this different? Largoplazo (talk) 22:40, 15 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

When I have some spare time, I actually go through our list, and remove those have been essentially translated and improved, tagging them as ce or cleanup. Lectonar (talk) 09:32, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Other projects archive their removed or resolved items; I wonder if we should do something like that as well. Mathglot (talk) 10:21, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not necessarily. I'm just gazing into the crystal ball to imagine a future where we have a PNT with maybe a couple dozen articles listed on it, because the other articles have been dealt with through some sort of process like WP:NPP or WP:Afc which have some global measure (a table?) of how much stuff is left to do, and some record of how we have been doing over time (a time-series graph?) with some procedures underlying it all to help organize reducing the backlog. So how do we get there from here? This was just me spitballing one idea, but I am open to anything. Mathglot (talk) 22:58, 15 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Process considerations

Some considerations when thinking about process:

How should we deal with out-of-process entries at PNT? One example of this, is § The Last Beautiful Thing, from July 2025. This entry was edited in manually, and not by template. The article The Last Beautiful Thing does not have a {{Rough translation}} or other translation template, and never did. That means it was never in a needs translation category, and if we create a backlog process to measure what is going on based on categories, we will have to consider outliers like this. Or perhaps we just ignore them initially, to catch the ones that are placed using the templates? Mathglot (talk) 19:53, 15 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There I would say: fix it when you see it, and add the rough translation template at least. Lectonar (talk) 09:35, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Category stats

PNT Category counts
Language	to be checked	needing cleanup
Albanian	1	0
Arabic	10	4
Armenian	0	0
Azerbaijani	3	4
Belarusian	0	3
Bosnian	0	0
Bulgarian	10	6
Burmese	0	1
Catalan	8	7
Cebuano	0	1
Chuvash	0	1
Chinese	15	63
Croatian	1	3
Czech	13	6
Danish	5	4
Dutch	0	11
Farsi	11	0
Finnish	10	3
French	159	85
German	42	65
Greek	4	5
Hebrew	8	1
Hindi	0	3
Hungarian	3	7
Indonesian	5	8
Italian	35	43
Japanese	3	46
Korean	3	20
Malay	0	3
Malayalam	1	2
Marathi	0	1
Mon	0	1
Nepali	0	1
Norwegian	10	0
Persian	1	13
Polish	15	22
Portuguese	27	45
Punjabi	2	0
Romanian	12	4
Russian	17	108
Serbian	2	12
Serbo-Croatian	0	1
Sinhala	0	2
Slovak	2	2
Slovenian	0	1
Spanish	127	120
Turkish	5	14
Turkmen	0	1
Ukrainian	6	19
Urdu	0	1
Uzbek	0	3
Vietnamese	1	12

The idea of measuring backlog above got me thinking. We have to start with stats about where we are now. This table is generated by template {{PNT table}} and shows the number of articles in each of the two categories used for each language, depending on the value of the |type= param. The categories for French, for example, are:

Comments on content and styling welcome.

I've stuck this table at the top of the PNT page for now, but probably we should add a section somewhere explaining ow we are handling categorization, and then place the table there.

Next step is to measure progress, by saving off these numbers somewhere (logical choice: into a data table on Commons), and then maybe grab them again in a week or so, and keep doing that regularly, if possible, then build charts off them. Mathglot (talk) 06:42, 16 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Charting the data

I am trying to chart the data that we have from yesterday. The first step was successful; adding the 18-Aug-2025 data into a Commons .tab file, at c:Data:PNT date.19-Aug-2025.tab. The next step is to create a .chart file in Commons to create a bar chart based on that data, but I am hitting a roadblock. I've posted a question about this at Mediawiki, and you can follow along at mw:Extension talk:Chart/Project#Tabular data source page is of invalid type. Mathglot (talk) 08:56, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, really great work you did here...tbh, it's completely beyond my capabilities, being an old coot and such...... Lectonar (talk) 09:34, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ta, Old coots Unite! and all that... I am really motivated to visualize the data, as I think that will make a difference in our cleanup activities. This new Extension:Chart that they created to replace Extension:Graph that has been broken for two or three years (hence, no pageviews charts anymore) is really non-obvious, and has a learning curve. I hope to get there at some point, and then be able to help others who have issues with it. Mathglot (talk) 10:03, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]