 Hello. Hello, everyone. I'm here to present a session on Translate Extension. Let me introduce myself. My name is Vera. I'm user Ata on Wikimedia Wikis. And let's start then. Here we go. I may not be the most experienced person to talk about Translate Extension. But I can easily be the most enthusiastic about it. I'm really a fan. And I will try to convey my feelings to you today. So what is the Translate Extension? As you know, Media Wiki is a software that has really many different things that help us use it. And Translate Extension makes Media Wiki a powerful tool to translate every kind of text, especially on multi-linkable Wikis. You can recognize pages that use Translate Extensions by these markers. So Media Wiki is the most famous, I think, example of that. If you see this little button, translate this page at the top and this pretty box of other languages that the page is available in, if you see this look, then Translate Extension is at work, where it is used. It is used on multiple Wikis. On Translate WikiNet, where we are able to translate the interface of our Wikis. But also on Metawiki, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikimania Wikis you might have seen, and more. Please not confuse it with the content translation, because this thing is not used on Wikipedia as content translation is. What we usually translate through Translate Extension is translating projects, contest pages, newsletters of different teams and affiliates, and such. And also, templates can be translatable as well if these templates are intended for usage on such project as I have just mentioned. How do you start translating? You just look for that Translate this page button and I can assure you that it is, however small this button is, people do find it. I sometimes see really random users from whom translating something on Metawiki is basically their first ever recorded edits and this fascinates me all the time. But how to make a page translatable is a whole different story. We have special users called translation administrators who have technical permissions for that. By now you might be thinking that I am explaining very basic things. If you are an experienced translation administrator, why would you need to know all that? I am hoping that this session will be useful for anyone who has ever crossed paths with Translate Extension. From different points of view, translators on one hand, creators of the pages, on another hand, mainly translation administrators and I will give you the points that I find useful myself being all three of those instances at once. I have created pages, I have translated them into Ukrainian multiple times, name a translation administrator as well. So first of all, let me just show my appreciation to this extension as a translator and as a Wikimedian. It's a nice and important extension. It allows me, let me be personal here, to bring closer some things that are going on in the broader Wikimedia movement to my own Ukrainian-speaking community. I take pride in the fact that Ukrainian community is always very active at different kind of elections and I attribute that not least to the fact that we always have the basic pages translated into Ukrainian and we can bring this very important information to the community in the language that it understands. An interface looks amazing for a translator. It has tiny blocks. It is a fairly easy system. You have your text to translate. You have your translation side by side. Here it's how it looks like. I can use different useful buttons and tabs here. So I select Ukrainian as a target language. I can sort out the untranslated parts of the page so that I don't have to look through the whole of it. I can filter this list of separate sort of chunks of text for translation by the words that I need, like looking for the exact paragraph where something was mentioned. So this is how it looks for a translator. Rather nicely, here at the bottom you can see the progress bar and see that several paragraphs on this page are outdated. Therefore, this orange part of the bar that indicates me that I have some work to do on this page or someone else who is able to do that. When I press on a paragraph, I see this. So I can see that this translation may need to be updated, but it's not a very crucial thing. Basically, from this view, I can't even tell you what changed there. And I also see suggestions. This is the translation memory. Similar paragraphs were already used somewhere on other pages, and so translation memory helps me with that. I can also choose in my preference to show suggestions in other languages. And here you'll see one of them, just for example. So really looks nice for me as a translator. Also, writing translatable pages is good for your skills of presenting information clearly. Both for native English speakers and non-native speakers, thinking about something with translation in mind allows you to formulate your thoughts more clearly in smaller sentences so that it can be easily translated to other languages because all languages function differently. Don't forget about that. An original page and its translated versions stay in unison. If something changes in the original, the translated page will be outdated and it will show to people that's important. This is why I like this thing. However, this is a non-ideal solution to the broad multilinguality problem. It is not ideal in many ways. And I will just list you the weak points that this extension has as of today. And it is a long list. There can only be one source language. A page cannot involve in several languages at once, though if you have a French page as an original, you can set up the language of the page to the French, but then it can always be translated only from French language and not from anything else. Translated categories are cluttered and useless. To some people, it is nice that they are created automatically sort of, but they may not help or may not be as useful as people want them to be. Renaming translatable page can be a mess. If it has hundreds of subpages, it's a very niche problem, yet it happens. Page administration requires lots of manual labor as translation administrators in the room will definitely now special page preparation intended to help page translation. There's eyes practically useless for very long and difficult settings. Let's see how the page looks when it has all the translation markup in it. It is definitely more cluttered than it would be without all that. And I will take this opportunity to mark these two things, to just tell you how they are called in our jargon. This T number is a translation marker and it is put by the extension automatically there to just number the translation units and translation unit is one separate chunk of text that is presented for translation. The weak points did not end there. Complex translation markup can be painful if you need to work with tables. When tags are added to source page, people who are not familiar with them can get scared away and discouraged from updating the page. There will always be a tagging mistake you will need to fix. That's actually a pretty common thing for Wikimedia in any case, but here it might be of different value fixing errors after your mistakes and others mistakes can make you edit all the translations as well. Yeah, this is the third slide from naming all the bad things about it and I will do that because there is no easy way to signal the translator that the change has happened. The change might be minor and writing on a talk page of multiple translators might seem as an overkill in some regards. Extension lags sometimes and requires dummy edits. The memory is not always working nicely and translators are frankly overwhelmed by the amount of work. There are lots of pages to be translated and no easy way to know what is most recent and most important and what isn't. And then if translation administrator makes a visible mistake, then it adds work too. However, what do we do with a poor tool like that? We use it as best as we can. In spite of all these weaknesses, it still has its core strength, right? It allows people to translate things. And when done nicely, when translation administrator breezes deeply and does his or her work, translation extension with all the workarounds that we have for it works fine. This is my personal opinion if you want to know. I think of this extension as an old cat. It may have its illnesses by now from old age, but we still love it. As a translator, let me give several pieces of advice to a person who approaches a page as a translator. You need to prioritize your work. A page is not your 100% priority when its targeted audience is fluent in English. It happens sometimes. It will be mostly true for media, Wiki, Wiki, for example. If you know that only developers will likely use that documentation page, then maybe it's not your priority to translate it. And if it is something that concerns broader community, then of course it is more important to translate that page. A text needs to be good as a text. Sometimes the fact that we have the page broken down into these small chunks prevents us translators from perceiving it as a whole thing. If there is a message, then it needs to deliver and not to be 100% exact as original because languages are all different. You can use aggregate groups to translate exactly the topic you want to work on. You can open special language stats and see pages grouped by some topic. For example, different sub pages that are connected to current elections this year. They are all in one aggregate group. You can open it as one very long page and just translate it for hours on end. And you can reuse previous translations. Some things that repeat all the time will be the same. Translation member will help you with that. But also you can use special search translations to search previous translatable and translated pages where something is mentioned. There are different glossaries. There is a main Wikimedia glossary. There are still some pages for local language teams. For example, if your language community is set it up, look for it if it is available. And there are also some thematic pages like movement strategy has their own page of terms listed there. So that can be helpful. And just basic search for other pages that might be connected and reuse the terms will help you as well. Since I've mentioned two special pages already, here is a special pages page on Meet a Wiki. And down almost at the end of the page, you will have this section, all the pages that are connected to translate extension. The ones in bold are used by a translation administrators only, but all the others will help you as an ordinary translator or editor as well. May I remind you that special pages are available on the left sidebar. Create, edit or update a page always with translation in mind. You don't have to be translation administrator to help everyone with the work with the flow of this extension. Write clearly, speak human, write small sentences, don't use colloquialisms and so on. Here is a link to the page where these guidelines are listed. Write with updates in mind. If something will change, try to word it in the way that will ease the updating of the page. For example, you can write a separate sentence for something that will be added there later instead of rewriting the previous things. Use common existing messages. There is a category of common messages with little templates for common phrases that can be reused like more languages. This is a template that basically shows a phrase. This message is available in more languages and it is translated and so it shows people that translations can be found in other places. Template edit section can help there as well. So there are already little things that you can look for. Translatable page has to be as stable as possible. So if you're setting up a contest page, for example, please try to write everything you can from the very beginning so that when the page is marked for translation, it will change only if there is a dire need. It is not a good idea to have translatable content and user comments on the same page. And here is an asterisk because I am speaking about translate extensions. There are other ways of translating content on our pages, but exactly for this extension, it's not a good idea because every comment that a person will add on the page will require the page to be marked for translation again. And this can be avoided, so please avoid it if you can. If an already translated page looks good enough, let it be, don't be perfectionist there. Some changes can just wait until something more dire happens. Move around translation markup. And here I mean move yourself, like if you don't understand something, if you're not familiar with it, don't delete it, don't change it, just edit the text that you need, add a separate paragraph with additional information on the page and so on. Visual editor supports translatable pages now, so you will see the commented things, translation markers there will be shown up as comments. Please don't delete those, they are useful. Here is a checklist for setting up a page for translation as I follow, this is my experience and I hope it will be useful for you as well. Here is my sandbox page, like just to show you an example of how a page that has to be translated later can look like. I have some section titles, I have a list, I have a little table, have a category, have different links through the page and an image. So let's go quickly through all that. Check whether a page is stable, this is the first thing you'll have to do is when you start to mark a page for translation and it's not necessarily to be a translation administrative to do that, but this is mainly for, so to say TAs right now. Check whether it is stable, whether all the wiki markup, not translation markup, but just wiki markup is in nice form in there, so that it is as stable as possible when you mark it. You put tag languages on top of the page to show that pretty box with languages later. You put blank lines after section titles, it is rather important, it makes it clear for translator that this is a section and it is a separate translation unit. So basically you can put an opening translate tag on top of your page and closing translate tag at the bottom, but then we have some additional things to do. At translation variables, so-called TVARs, different links get different treatment. Links to Wikipedia say as they are because you probably want your translators to localize that and put links to their own language Wikipedia, right? But external links that will not be changed regardless what language of translation they will be in have to go into translation variable so that when the link is inside this tag in the source code the translator will just see a little word link that will indicate that the link is there and will not have to deal with the whole lot of link markup in the translation. Special, my language is a nice prefix that has to be used in front of any translatable page. In theory, if it is not translatable yet, but it will be, you better use that prefix so that when a person clicks that on a translated version of the page they go to their language version and break paragraphs into smaller chunks. Paragraphs may be long. People like to translate smaller things. It's just emotionally easier. One sentence is okay, two or three is they are short but please give translators whole sentences whenever possible. Don't go into the other direction of breaking the page into very small pieces because not all languages work the same as English do, right? So we need to have the whole idea, the whole sentence to be able to translate it properly. Let's look at this sandbox page again and I'm sorry that it has this very small font but you can recognize the links, right? I'm linking Lorem Ipsum at the beginning. I'm linking Wikimanias submissions for some reason. There are different types of links here, right? And at the bottom of the page below the edit field you have this toolbar with different translation tags as well as other tags so they can help you. You have the translate tags, the languages and T-bars tags here to help you with inserting them. Here is how the page will look like after my tagging. So languages on top, translate tags, embrace every chunk of text that I want translated. So I'm leaving out the name of the file for example because it is unnecessary for translated to see that if they will not change it. I am putting all the links into T-bars, the links that have to be unchanged regardless of the language, right? And the email is also in the translation variable so that it is not changed accidentally into something that people cannot use. This is actually not as bad as it could be. And you can see the second paragraph is broken down as well as the first one, as all of them. Into smaller chunks of translation you can see the closing tag translate and then the opening tag right after it it will still look as one paragraph on the translated page but it will look as separate translation units for translation and it is a little bit easier for translators with that. So excluding non-translatable markup is a rather important thing. It avoids the clutter for translators because if they don't need to change something they just have to go around it and it takes more effort. Put each list item into its own translate tag pair. This is also done in these thinking about translators and making things easier for them. Categories go outside the tags. They don't have to be translated as other things. They are translated this way. They're using the magic word. Use anchors for section titles if they are referred from other pages because if you are linking to a translatable page into a section or on a translatable page and give the link with the hashtag and the English title of this section this link will not work for the translated versions of the page unless you put an anchor there. This is something that sounds stupid pretty much but something that we still have to do. Preview the page, look for the translate tags or anything else unusual showing up in the text. Sometimes if you are excluding all the additional markup from the page you might lose some opening, closing, translate tags. It helps for me to just search on the page for translate and opening and closing tags and just look if the numbers of them are the same. But yeah, if something is wrong you will see it on preview. Translation where a translation of templates and pages is a thing. So if you want a template on your page or a transcluded page to be shown in other languages as well you will have to mark those for translation and not forget to have this check of transclusion allowed there just be aware that it is the same. Previously we needed to use a separate template called TNT for that but no more. So it's something that became easier for translation admins lately. Then you save the page. You press the mark this page for translation check if all the units look okay to you and if they don't you go back and edit your page again before you are actually marking it for translation because you don't need to create unnecessary work for translators I think we can agree on that. Unit markers those letters T with numbers are assigned automatically. You don't have to put them manually. You don't have to change them manually and you don't need to worry that these markers are on the page in their numerical order. It doesn't matter. The system understands how they are should be given on the page in the translated version of the pages. Don't worry about those most of the times you don't need to worry about them. Stop for a second and congratulate yourself for good work because by now it is really good work that you've done. Then you press translate this page check if all the units look okay to you as a translator even if you're just an English speaker and you don't know other languages. You can choose translating to Polish for example and just check if everything is okay. If there are no broken things or at least things that look like broken links there anything unusual that you can spot up before all the other translators spot that up is important. So please do that. You can press notify translators if needed. This is done on the page of marking the page for translation. I know that not all admins use that and not always because what it does it sends a notification to all the translators on this wiki that are signed up as translators and these are hundreds of people if I'm not mistaken and it sounds like a lot. So it is usually used for really important things, right? But you can call translators in whatever other methods you use on translation now the mailing list using talk pages of the user that you know if you need to have updates in only several target languages, right? And so on. Add a page to an aggregate group. This is useful for people who translate multiple pages in bulk and also looks neat when all things are related. And again, congratulate yourself for good work because you have done well and this is the third part of the checklist that is always done by the most sturdy of translation admins and there are not many of those. Here it, the same sandbox page of mine how it looks for a translator. So I see it untranslated here and here is a little button that can be used not by translator or not only but by you as editor of the page or a translation admin is adding documentation for this particular translation unit. And it is a very useful tool especially when you are hiding into translation variable something that is not obvious. If you are using a term that is not obvious in meaning from my experience, I remember the troubles we've had with the word equity the first time it started to be used. And so here you can add the documentation on how to translate this particular unit of text. And it is useful and it is important for translators to have that. And the last part of the checklist what should I do then? Excuse me, I will try to show my slides again All right, last few slides. Adding documentation I have already mentioned. When the text is updated, a translation admin will have to mark the page for translation again so that all the changes in the source text are forwarded for translators to work on. Check if the units are marked as needing to be updated only when necessary. We'll see that on marking the page for translation as the checkboxes and sometimes it is needed and sometimes it isn't, it is up to you just pay attention to that. If units are split, please update existing translations yourself if you can because this is a manual thing and not a creative thing and not a translator thing. If you had two sentences in one unit and now you have two separate units this is something that usually can be done by the very person who is splitting this unit as a translation admin. And if you know that it has to be done it is easier for you to do that than to gather dozens of translators to do that in their own languages one by one. Here is an example and I'm not saying that this is a bad page being marked for translation but here is an example what happens when something is split. So I've been asking in changes to workflows and the date previously where in the same unit and now these are separate units. This is something that I understand why it is marked as fuzzy for me as a translator because using the brackets is not the same different languages and so on. But this is something that can be avoided or should be or just please be mindful about that. Use fabricator for reporting bugs meaning very hard things that prevent you from using the extension. Some unknown for a long time but you can subscribe to those and add new info. And here I mentioned too that I am following them most closely. Most awaited fix is adding the anchors automatically and hopefully will happen in the future. Old one about the translation memory not working in certain cases has its work around in different places. For example, there is a template sold exactly for translating tech news which are a weekly newsletter. So if you're translating tech news have look at that and if you're a translation admin maintaining something as repetitive as tech news or you can use that as a template for your own work around maybe. We have needs and translate does not meet all of them yet. Here I'm listing four of the need that other people that I've talked to mentioned to me they should be awaited translate the page and all of the templates it use easily just like aggregate groups are special preparation could be more useful. Echo notification would be great but this is something that we just need to push. Language and translation team of the foundation will definitely help. I am not aware whether these examples here are already listed on fabricator or not. This is just that I know people are talking about but what we do need we need to move our oral and folk knowledge into some written form. So if any of you would like to help on that that would be great. What I did not talk about in this session and there is a lot of things to talk about the translate wiki and how it is used for non wiki media things. The templates they are whole different story not so different but other things are to be said about that. There is a need of balancing using templates on pages for optimization. The style of marking things for translation sometimes differ and we can have a friendly argument about which are used because the books may not be coherent in all the instances but help is always out there. And I hope that you'll be able to feel better about the translate and how you use that fast-paced mask on yourself than on others. This is something that helps me and hopefully will have to you. My personal thanks to people who helped me while preparing this thing and always was work on the translate extension itself. If you have your favorite users who can help you that's great, we are a community. There are pages that will help you with working on the translate extension. The documentation is always there. Other pages marked for translation you can open in editing mode and just use it as a cheat sheet. And MetaTalk Babylon is for those who want to ask questions in person. It is monitored by some very experienced translation administrators so don't hesitate to write your questions there. This is a phrase that I've heard recently about our experience with translate extension. We're practicing equitable inconvenience here. Everyone is a little bit inconvenienced by it. But in the end, when we do our parts when editor creates a page nicely and translation administrator nicely does the markup and translator nicely does his or her job. The result is the usable translated version of the page in multiple languages that can be used by broader community and this is our goal. And I hope that the sheer understanding of everyone doing their job so to say in a good way makes us a closer community and makes more people engaged in what we do. Thank you for your attention. I hope to make you feel better. So do let me know if and why in your opinion I succeeded or not. You can find me anywhere and do please write on those talk pages like meta talk Babylon that I mentioned before if you have questions on translate extension itself. Thank you very much. This is it for me and I think we're out of time.