Commons talk:Requests for translation

 

Proposal for reviving this page

Problem

Sometimes, discussions arise where users need translations of their comments. There exists no current established way of doing this, other than everyone having to get their own translators. This has a couple of weaknesses.

Firstly, it introduces a delay into the process waiting for a translator if the one a certain user picks is busy or simply not around. Secondly, it may put unwarranted pressure on certain users who get a reputation for being good translators, drawing their time from projects they are keen to work on.

The drawback of this proposal is that it needs a critical mass of translators who watch the requests and respond or else it will fail.

Proposal

Modelled after various "?fD" pages, requests for translation would be tagged with a template (e.g. Template:Translation request or Template:Transreq) placed under the text to be translated. The requests would then be listed on this page (with a second template for consistency) for translators watching it.

In the event the page would get high traffic, it could be split into subpages according to source language that translators might to watch individually.

Related links

• Commons:Language policy
• Template:Translation
• Commons:List of administrators by language — Definately worth including.
• Template:Requests for Translation
• Template:Requested Translations
• Template:Completed Translations

Revival discussion

I'm proposing this after, to my surprise, it turns out that there is no coordinated way of managing this. I was involved in a discussion where an admin had closed some deletion discussions without having much of a grasp of the language. In ensuing discussion at the Village pump, the discussion needed constant translations of everything into Chinese for the admin and back into English after he had replied. I believe that discussion would have benefitted from some sort of arrangement such as the one above.

If people see this as a good idea, I will (along with anyone else who is interested) start building this up. --Swift 04:44, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

I think it is a superb idea. Can I also add templates here? Template:Speedywhat to Japanese. / Fred Chess 17:56, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Sure. I'm not sure how much traffic this page would get (translators' views on that would be welcome), but currently I'm more worried about there being too little and sporadic than too much. We could split the page up into multiple sections for each type of task (or, rather, urgency) as is done on m:Meta:RFD. --Swift 20:58, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

I think this is extremely unlikely to work. Translators (that is, multilingual people) simply don't walk around looking for translations to do. Waiting for people to show up and feel like translating stuff simply doesn't work. Whereas making a personal request to someone actually does. The success can be seen in the translations of template:welcome, which were mostly made after personal requests. Secondly, this certainly won't work if you provide no information to the translators about which language is required. A Japanese translator is not going to be interested in checking this page every week when all the requests are in Finnish. pfctdayelise (说什么?) 06:05, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to comment.

Translators [...] simply don't walk around looking for translations to do. I realize this and the proposal above doesn't assume that they will. It does assume that there are editors out there who are willing to do such work, however. As expressed above in the section #Proposal, the idea is that if translators would be willing to add this one page to their watchlist and if they actually would monitor it regularly, they would see new translation requests with little extra effort.

The success can be seen [...]. I certainly don't meant to say that the current system doesn't work. This proposal is to suggest an improvement to it. The perceived problems with the current system are stated above in the sub-section #Problem.

this certainly won't work if you provide no information to the translators about which language is required. Certainly! There was never any idea to implement this without that. There are several ways of implementing this.

• Editors might be urged to put source and destination languages into their edit summaries. That information appears on the watchlist so that translators can choose which requests to screen.
• There could be made a template for the translation request which would take as arguments the source and destination languages along with an identifier (title) for the request. The template could then add a header with the identifier and languages which would appear in the watchlist, both upon request and in subsequent discussion.

Again, the main idea is that all translators would be encouraged to watch this page (just as admins are advised to watch admin noticeboards) to minimize the time lag between request and translation, and to best share the translation burden so that some "popular" translators don't drown in requests. --Swift 06:52, 3 October 2006 (UTC)