Request temporary removal of translation right for user:DDPAT

Request temporary removal of translation right for user:DDPAT

User:DDPAT is an overactive user who makes bad translations. He already translated everything into Ukrainian except for Phabricator project.

I did not want the user to be banned right away, because not all the translations are bad, some are ok. But the ones with mistakes are rudely incorrect, to the point that it's better to have English original. User's English is not sufficient, he doesn't work on getting to know the project he translates the UI for, and on top of that he goes translating too quickly, overlooking mistakes that could have been noticed. He agrees that his command of English is low but continues to work enthusiastically even though I begged to slow down, and familiarise himself with the project before translating.

TWN is not tweaked for proofreading the work of a certain user, so it's a rather hard thing to do. The user translated some projects that I have no idea about and I can't judge the accuracy of translation there. I know no one who can proofread Phabricator translations after him if he continues, therefore I ask for right removal.

Ата (talk)‎17:35, 27 October 2021

Thanks for opening a discussion. When was this discussed before? Only in Thread:User talk:DDPAT/Що ви робите??

"Low quality" is rarely grounds for block or deflag because it's so hard to judge. I'd like to see some sort of consensus on portal talk:uk or similar to make such a decision (similar to mass removals of translations and so on). Being uncooperative or knowingly disruptive is another matter.

Maybe you can manage to find an agreement on what kind of projects/whatever are most suitable for them to translate in the future, to divide work with other Ukrainian translators? Or you can come up with a plan for them to correct at least some common type of error they made? Special:SearchTranslations may help find patterns.

Nemo (talk)‎18:58, 27 October 2021

I am not sure there was a discussion on Translatewiki, but the user participates on Ukrainian Wikimedia Community Discord server for a while and we had a lot of opportunities to discuss his translations as well as to try to persuade, sometimes really beg him to stop.

While he seems to show some understanding and some of the examples I will show precede those attempts to reach some understanding, unfortunately it seems that the user does not intend to stop.

For instance, today on the Discord server he has asked whether "Масив вибраних таблиць cargo на основі полів, групування за та впорядкування за автоматично заповнюється." would be a good translation for MediaWiki:Apihelp-cargoqueryautocomplete-param-tables/en's Array of selected cargo table(s) based on which Field(s), Group By and Order By are autocompleted. While it is clear that what the message has is some sort of SQL-like keywords, he does not realise it and attempts to translate "Order By" and other literally word by word (instead of leaving it be or at least using "ordering" instead). When instead of providing my suggestion I have asked the user to just skip the message (and better all API help group), he has told that he cannot do that. I am not sure whether it is some sort of OCD, naïve enthusiast or some other sort of issue, but in case of API help as a user I have to switch by interface language to English when I can no longer trust translation quality lest a bot I am writing does something wrong because of poor translations…

If you look at my recent contributions you will find quite a few reverts of the user who has "fixed" tens of messages by replacing the word for campaign (кампанія) with the word for company (компанія), basing on him not knowing those are two different words… (Even "campanian age" did not avoid the same fate in EOL:Website-term.name.by uri.http://resource(dot)geosciml(dot)org/classifier/ics/ischart/Campanian/uk…). While it is one example I know that there are other such examples yet to be discovered, for instance the user themselves mentioned that he has trouble understanding when the word "account" refers to a bank account and when to an account you create by registration on a website which have different translations in Ukrainian ([банківський] рахунок and обліковий запис respectively).

In MediaWiki:Growthexperiments-mentor-dashboard-mentee-overview-add-filter-total-edits-headline/uk yesterday I had to fix his translation of "Edit count" saying "to edit a counter", Редагувати лічильник, to a proper, number of edits, "Число редагувань" (could also be Кількість редагувань, amount of edits). I had discovered the message on the screenshots of the newly deployed feature the message corresponds to. While it is not uncommon for people to misinterpret such word clusters in English, in this case both the general context and the specific context provided in qqq, "Headline in mentee filtering interface" give a good enough background to translate it correctly. Interestingly he did manage to translate the same message correctly to Russian, MediaWiki:Growthexperiments-mentor-dashboard-mentee-overview-add-filter-total-edits-headline/ru has the valid translation saying "edit counter". But it is not always the case that his Russian translations are good either, for instance in MediaWiki:Growthexperiments-mentor-dashboard-mentee-overview-info-legend-star/uk, he made the opposite mistake, misinterpreted the verb to bookmark to be a noun a bookmark, and in this case he has made the same mistake also in Russian, MediaWiki:Growthexperiments-mentor-dashboard-mentee-overview-info-legend-star/ru in fact still says "a mentees bookmark", which I guess is not as critical and as the poor API documentation and would still be understandable, but would be perceived as a broken language that is quite characteristic of poor quality translation. This unfortunately also shows that the issue is not only with Ukrainian translations, although I think the bigger part of the user's translations are into Ukrainian.

I have decided to check the recentmost 10 edits now:

Let's take 10 more from a few days deeper:

I have also looked at some Phabricator translations. They seem to be ok, but the problem is that in case of Phabricator it is especially difficult to determine when they are not, as Phabricator has notoriously useless message documentation.

The problem is that 95% of the user's translations or even more are good. But the problem is that his poor command of English, which he backs by using Google Translate (and uses quite responsibly in fact) results in such hiccups as some of the above. Sometimes the hiccups are just strange, for example Mifos:X-validation.msg.calendar.endDate.cannot.be.blank/ru would be a good translation, if not for a grammatical gender mismatch in the translation (поле is neuter in Russian, and thus it should have been «пустым» instead of «пустой», it is quite a major grammar mistake, although does not hinder comprehension). It is not uncommon for people to make mistakes, I am sure I can go through my own, or Ата's contributions and find some, some as embarrassing as above, but the problem is that I am sure that both Ата and I would be able to pinpoint the mistake and fix it. Unfortunately I do not believe DDPAT can. If it was possible to let them translate but only propagate his translations to production once they were reviewed I would be all pro him continuing translating, but I do not believe it is possible, thus I have to support the notion of the translator rights removal.

We had another case of poor quality translations to Ukrainian, by Andriykopanytsia who while knowing English and Ukrainian well didn't know anything about MediaWiki and Wikimedia, and thus left us with legacy of many a message to be reviewed, and I am afraid we are not ready to have that backlog increased by a lot again. Poor translations are especially unfair towards third party platforms as they might dissuade people from using them, but we also don't want to deal with MediaWiki/Wikimedia messages that have wrong translations that are not always easy to catch either.

Basetalkcontributions‎12:50, 28 October 2021

Thank you, I will take this into account, and I promise that I will definitely get better.

> For instance, today on the Discord server he has asked whether "Масив вибраних таблиць cargo на основі полів, групування за та впорядкування за автоматично заповнюється." would be a good translation for MediaWiki:Apihelp-cargoqueryautocomplete-param-tables/en's Array of selected cargo table(s) based on which Field(s), Group By and Order By are autocompleted.

It's completely different, because I do it on a completely different site.

DDPAT (talk)‎18:22, 28 October 2021

Fair enough regarding this one, it seems that the translation on TWN is already existing and questionable and wasn't done by you.

Basetalkcontributions‎23:44, 28 October 2021
 
 

Hi! First of all, I am not too much of authority and I am not familiar with most of user's translation but I wanted to give clear examples of incorrect translations from the user that accidentally got my attention. This and this and this are what I found. The first edit, despite looking minor, completely ruins sentence from grammatical point of view. The second and third examples demonstrate translations that just make no sense at all. Also there were couple of this type of edits that are minor but also wrong. Yesterday I had a chat with DDPAT about the whole situation. On the one hand, he kinda understands what are his problems in this project (usage of Google translate and etc.) but on the other hand, I once more had to beg him not to translate things he has no clue about. I agree with Base that "poor translations are especially unfair towards third party platforms" because I literally discovered them while using the soft, however, I am not one to decide what to do with user's translation right.

Renvoy (talk)‎17:07, 29 October 2021
 

Hello, Ata. I did not translate the fabricator, so you asked not to do it as you indicated, and as I claim due to the low level of English proficiency. But I want to note a little bit that I used to translate these projects very actively and «quickly», and now I'm just a little more or less updating or creating new messages, which later appear.

Yes, of course I want only the best, and yes, sometimes I also may not notice some mistakes, and it may seem that I am very short of creating this translation so that there is Ukrainian everywhere, and this is partly true, but… But I I hope that I haven't caused much damage that needs to be read, and that I won't be as active as before. I hope we can find some consensus, because I can always count on your advice, because you have some experience with it.

DDPAT (talk)‎19:10, 27 October 2021
 

You can filter for DDPAT's recent translations for review using a manually constructed link: https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:Translate?action=proofread&group=%21recent&language=uk&filter=translated%7Clast-translator%3A31588

You can also change the group parameter.

Nike (talk)‎06:26, 30 October 2021
 
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