Request temporary removal of translation right for user:DDPAT
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:
- Wikimedia:Wikipedia-android-strings-notifications menu user talk page/uk — looks ok
- Wikimedia:Wikipedia-android-strings-notifications all types text/uk — looks ok-ish, the original message is poorly documented, it is not clear why there are those quotation marks
- Wikimedia:Wikipedia-android-strings-notifications all wikis text/uk — same as above (although use is not consisent in using Усі vs Всі for some reason here, grammaticaly Усі should have been used in both cases, but it is a minor mistake).
- Wikimedia:Wikipedia-android-strings-notifications type filter header/uk — should probably say Фільтр за типом (Filter by type) instead of Тип фільтра (Type of the filter).
- Wikimedia:Wikipedia-android-strings-notifications wiki filter header/uk — Okayish, although I would write Фільтр за вікі
- Wikimedia:Wikipedia-android-strings-notifications menu uncheck all/uk — Okay, I am not sure if it is the most conventional way to translate uncheck, but the word is tricky to translate smoothly
- Wikimedia:Wikipedia-android-strings-notifications menu check all/uk — Instead of "Check all items" it says "Review all items". In the next message, the one I mention here above, the user clearly understands that check refers to some kind of selection such as a checkbox in this case, not to checking-reviewing, but does not come back to fix the translation
- Wikimedia:Wikipedia-android-strings-notifications swipe action unread/uk — Ok
- Wikimedia:Wikipedia-android-strings-notifications swipe action read/uk — Ok
- Wikimedia:Wikipedia-android-strings-notifications menu mark as unread/uk — Ok
- Wikimedia:Wikipedia-android-strings-notifications menu mark as read/uk — Ok
Let's take 10 more from a few days deeper:
- Wikimedia:Commons-android-strings-custom selector info text2/uk — Ok-ish (uses click instead of touch, but it is acceptable)
- MediaWiki:Wikibase-dispatchstats-number-of-entities-in-queue/uk — Ok (except that we commonly use another character for apostrophe)
- MediaWiki:Wikibase-dispatchstats-number-of-changes-in-queue/uk — Ok
- MediaWiki:Wikibase-dispatchstats-above/uk — interprets the message correctly, but misuses PLURAL by providing only the first of 3 variants. It should have been "Є більше $1 {{PLURAL:$1|зміни|змін|змін}}."
- MediaWiki:Wikibase-dispatchstats-estimate/uk — same as above
- MediaWiki:Wikibase-dispatchstats-newest/uk — Ok
- MediaWiki:Wikibase-dispatchstats-oldest/uk — Ok
- MediaWiki:Wikibase-dispatchstats-empty-queue/uk — dubious whether the queue name should have been translated, but Ok
- MediaWiki:Wikibase-dispatchstats-intro/uk — Ok
- MediaWiki:Growthexperiments-structuredtask-user-error-login-cta/uk — Ok
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.
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.