Hi, I noticed the Content translation tool has a hard time with references - I was working on German to English (via Simple English) for the article wikipedia:The Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law, and I noticed that it often had a hard time dealing with translating references. Would the team be open to having some sort of separate view for sources, or to having the option to import references untranslated?
Topic on Talk:Content translation/Flow
Absolutely agree, translating sources is seriously painful. In fact, I'm not even willing to do it. If the source is in english, how am I going to translate that? Seems like a bug more than anything to do with translation.
Thanks for the feedback.
Currently reference contents are translated when they should not be. There is a ticket capturing the issue and we'll be changing the default behaviour. If you have more details about this issue feel free to share them.
Currently different templates on each wiki are used to structure different kinds of references. This makes it hard for the tool to find the corresponding templates for each language and determine which parameter to copy into which one. As a result some information is lost in the process. We plan to make several improvements related to references to make this process more solid.
@Furicorn, regarding the "separate view" for sources, do you refer to a view that shows side by side the information from the source and target reference to map it (copy, translate, etc.) more easily? As we refactored the tool to use Visual Editor in the new version, we integrated many of their tools as they are, but we can consider further adjustments for adapting some to the specific needs of translation. Such a view would require some effort to build and would rely on our capability to find equivalent parameters. Once we make more solid the parameter mapping process, which will improve the automatic transfer of templates we'll reevaluate how much a custom editor may still be needed.
So I'd point you to this diff. In this diff, I have a huge chunk of text that I imported via the translation tool, and have been doing a bunch of cleanup on the sources. Most of these sources were not in any kind of template, they were just freehand sources between <ref> tags. One example in reference 40 is that the ref name of "Riff S. 68" was translated to "Reef S. 68", as though the last name were itself a translation target. Or, reference 25, 34, or 37 start with an abbreviation (such as German "z.B." for "e.g.", or "S." for "p.") but the translator seems to ignore anything after the first period.
I think the best behavior for now is for the tool to avoid translating anything between <ref> tags, because beyond even what I've encountered, you've said, there are a lot of complications with inter-language citation template differences. And actually, even if all the parameters are mapped, maybe the correct behavior there is to only use translation for citation templates, but then have a distinct UI for dealing with freehand references.