Help:Content translation/Starting/Dashboard
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The Translation Dashboard is the central place where your translation activity starts. You can manage your translations, start new ones, explore suggestions for articles to translate, and check your translation progress.
You can access the dashboard through your contributions page, searching for "Special:ContentTranslation" (or "Special:CX") in your wiki's search box, or keeping a direct link to it.
The translation dashboard is available in Wikipedia for all languages, and it provides an unified view regardless of the specific language wiki you access it from. That is, you'll see the same unified list of all your translations if you access Content Translation in Japanese, French, or Swahili.
The dashboard provides different views for translations in different stages (suggestions, in-progress, and published), as well as functionality to start a translation of your choice ("New translation"), statistics for you to track your progress, and additional help. These elements are described below in more detail.
New translation
The "New translation" button allows to quickly start a new translation. A multi-step dialog will let you search for an article to translate and start the translation. These are the steps in more detail:
- Select "New translation" from the dashboard. The blue button is available on top of the dashboard and it is available from all the different views of the dashboard for easy access.
- Search for the article you want to translate. As you type the article title, suggestions will appear. These will show images and descriptions when available for you to confirm the article is about the topic you expected. In addition, the number of languages in which the article is available is shown with an additional indicator highlighting it is missing on some language you may know. Note that the language used for searching is indicated at the end of the search bar. You can change the language used to search for selecting articles to translate from a different language.
- Confirm the selection. Once you selected the page to translate, you can select the language you want to translate the content into, or adjust the language to translate from. Selecting the page title allows to open the article and explore its contents in more detail. Additional information such as the number of views the page has in the source wiki is also surfaced to give a rough idea of the demand for this topic. When you are ready, you just need to select "Start translation" and start translating.
It is possible to start a translation for an article that already exists, but a warning will be shown for you to make sure to check which is the existing content and make an informed decision on how to publish the translation, whether to overwrite it or use the translated content to extend the existing one.
In progress translations
The list of in progress translations shows the translations that you started, but have not been published yet.
Once you start a translation, your changes will be saved automatically. This allows you to continue the work on your translations in multiple sessions. You can leave a translation and continue working on it later until you decide to publish it.
The list of in progress translations shows the progress you made on each translation. You don't need to translate all the contents in the source article, but this progress bar can be a useful reference on how much of the source article you covered with your translation.
When there are translations for different languages, the list can be filtered in order to focus on a specific language pair. The language selector will show translations for all languages by default, as it is captured by the "All › All" language selector at the end of the list header.
You can delete any of your translations by clicking on the trash icon for any item in the list. This will delete the progress you made for the translation.
Don't delay publishing for too long
Although it is possible to work on a translation in multiple sessions it is recommended not to delay publishing for too long. Keep in mind that the original article will evolve over time as the community of editors works on it. Most of the time the changes to the original article will be incorporated when you resume an old translation, but it may not be possible to update heavy changes on the source article that affect the paragraphs that you already translated. In those cases you have to decide whether to continue the translation for an old version of the original content or start your translation again for the updated content.
In addition, the translations which are in progress cannot be started by other users for the same language pair, so keeping translations for a long period prevents other editors to translate the same topic. Please consider deleting your in-progress translations if you no longer plan to work on them.
Content translation is intended to help you create an initial version of an article by reusing the efforts of the editing community in another language. Once you publish your translation it will become a regular article that can be improved with the usual editing tools. The in progress translation represent a temporary state for you to decide which contents to add and review them before publishing. After one year, in progress translations may be automatically deleted to avoid the described issues.
Published translations
The list of published translations shows the articles you created with the tool. The list shows the translations with the date they were published and the percentage of the original article that was translated.
You can access the published articles by clicking the items on the list. It is recommended to review the contents after publishing paying attention to any issues that other editors may have raised in the talk page. You can also filter the list to focus on a specific language pair with the language selector at the list header.
An option to continue the translation for articles that have already been published is also available using the pencil icon, but it should be used with care. Keep in mind that once you publish a page, other editors may work on it, and publishing an updated translation would overwrite any changes they may have made. So be extremely careful when continuing a published translation.
If you are interested in the translations created by other users, the usual review tools such as Recent Changes can be used with a filter for content translation, a specific API is also provided for accessing such information programatically and to reflect it on statistics.
Suggestions
The suggestions view provides ideas on articles you may want to translate. These combine general suggestions with personalised ones based on previous articles you translated. Visit the suggestions view and refresh the list of suggestions frequently when looking for new ideas. Even if you don't have time to translate several interesting suggestions right away, you can also keep them for later easily.
Your statistics
The dashboard shows basic statistics about your translations: the total number of translations you made with the tool, and those you made during this month. It also shows a bar chart for the recent months to illustrate your rate fo contributions over time and encourage your progress. The bar and the numbers corresponding to this month are presented in blue to facilitate the comparison with previous activity.
Help to translate
The "Need help translating?" section provides access to help resources that can be useful to improve your understanding and use of the tool. Currently it provides access to the following resources:
- More about this tool provides access to the documentation you are reading now.
- Statistics provide access to the main statistics for the tool. There you can find how many translations have been published for all languages or for a specific language pair and their evolution over time, as well as the number of users.
- Give us feedback links to the discussion page for the project where you can report issues that you find while translating, share ideas to improve the tool or just share your general impression of the tool.