User talk:Seanlip

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Updating translations

Latest comment: 2 months ago6 comments2 people in discussion

Hi,

You have updated translations in several languages, for example here. Where are these translations coming from? Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 20:41, 14 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hi Amir, thanks for checking. I'm the tech lead of the Oppia project, which imports these translations. We have been facing issues with importing a number of the translations during our regular merge from translatewiki, because some of the translations are invalid/incorrect in a way that breaks the HTML (e.g. they don't have the same HTML tags as the original translation). This keeps causing us manual work during each merge, so I decided to try and fix it at the source -- hence the multiple edits.

As a general note, I think it would be great if we could have a hard blocker on the translations that aren't compliant so that they don't get uploaded as part of the import, but I'm not sure how feasible that is on the translatewiki end (though I did notice some validation logic when submitting them). If it's not feasible to omit those from the update push, no worries; we'd be happy to do the manual work or cleanup as needed.

Hope this provides context, and happy to follow up more as needed! Seanlip (talk) 02:12, 15 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, it makes sense.

Harder validation is perhaps conceivable, but I usually don't deal with it directly. I recommend asking about it on the Support page.

I'm still wondering, however—where did the Hebrew text come from? Did another Hebrew translator make it? Or is it a machine translation? Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 02:44, 15 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thanks Amir! Sounds good, I can start a discussion on the Support page.

For the Hebrew text, that particular one did give me some concern -- that specific translation has actually been causing issues in our import process for several months because I couldn't figure out how to fix it. The earlier translation missed out half the English text, and since this is important functionality (it relates to deleting accounts), we need that translation to cover the full sentence.

Unfortunately, (a) I couldn't figure out how to delete the translation or change it back to "untranslated", and (b) I don't know Hebrew. So I did end up using the machine translation, which seemed to be the only option I had :( I figured that it was likely good enough and could be updated in the future if needed. That said, if you happen to know Hebrew and can take a look at it, please feel absolutely free to edit it as you see fit, though this is totally optional!

Also, for future reference, is there a way to do (a) -- i.e. mark a translation as "not completed" through the UI? I would have preferred to choose that option if it existed, so that it can be retranslated properly.

Thanks again for your help, I appreciate your getting in contact regarding this. Seanlip (talk) 03:40, 15 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

OK. Usually, machine translation is very strongly discouraged if you don't know the language and cannot fix its mistakes. If it is technically important, as it is in your case, do the following:

Add the string "!!FUZZY!!" to the beginning of the translated string. It will update the translation in your source tree, but it will also mark it as needing update for the translators here.
Contact a translator into that language and ask them to fix it. You can find active translators by going to Special:ActiveLanguages and clicking on a language name.

Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 16:52, 15 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hi Amir, sounds good, we can do that in the future.

Thank you again for your help -- really appreciate it! Seanlip (talk) 16:54, 15 October 2024 (UTC)Reply