Wikipedia:Translation
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Many articles in English Wikipedia have been added or expanded by translating information from articles from other languages' Wikipedias. This page discusses the methods, considerations, and templates for translating those articles or requesting such.
Note that this page is not for requesting translations of copyrighted sources outside Wikipedia. It is also not for articles currently in English Wikipedia that are not in English. For that, please see Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English.
Translation from another language to English
If there is an article in another language's Wikipedia about a topic not yet covered by an article here, and you would like to translate it yourself, see the procedures and conditions below. You can browse the articles needing translation from foreign-language Wikipedias to find one article you are interested in. You may also improve an existing article here with content translated from another Wikipedia. The same conditions regarding acknowledging the source apply as for a full translation.
Requesting a translation from another language's Wikipedia into English is easy.
- If the English article already exists (but a translation would be useful because the article in the other language is of higher quality, or includes additional information): simply place a translation template from the category Category:Expand by language Wikipedia templates on the English article page. For example, to request improvement of the English article on Fuerteventura, based on the equivalent article on Spanish Wikipedia, place {{Expand Spanish|Fuerteventura}} on the English article Fuerteventura.
- If the English article does not yet exist:
- you can create a starter article (at least a stub) in English, using the process described at Your first article; once you have created the article, tag it with a translation template, as mentioned above.
- or add a page request red link in the Requested articles Project section with the proposed title of the article which will contain the translation adding an interwiki link to the other language's Wikipedia page(s). Note that fewer people will likely see a request created using this method.
- or ask a translator directly on their talk page, by taking a look at the list of available translators or the category of available translators.
Content
All English Wikipedia articles must meet the requirements of the three core content policies no original research, neutral point of view and verifiability. This is particularly true for biographies of living people. In addition articles must also comply with the copyright policy and notability guideline.
Articles translated from other languages are expected to meet English Wikipedia's notability guidelines; simply having an article on another Wikipedia project does not establish notability by itself.
All material in a Wikipedia article, including everything in lists, tables, and captions, must also be verifiable. This means that people are able to check that information comes from a reliable source.
- Meet the English requirements: Many foreign language articles do not meet the levels of verifiability that is expected in English Wikipedia articles. If an article has sections with no citations then follow the guidance in UNSOURCED and either provide additional inline sources, or add appropriate citation needed templates as described in UNSOURCED. Content that cannot be verified must not be imported into English Wikipedia.
- What sources to use: Include the same sources that the original article used, if they are appropriate. For example, if you're not translating some text in the original article because you think it's irrelevant, then omit the related citations, or find other text in the article that they support.
- English sources preferred: Do check to see if an English-language citation is available that is the equivalent of the foreign-language citation (for example an authorized translation), since that's easier for readers to verify. If you do find one, you don't need to include the foreign-language citation. If you use a translated edition of a book, make sure to adjust the page numbers to those in the translation.
- Partial translation: If portions of an article appear to be low-quality or unverifiable, use your judgment and do not translate those portions. Once you have finished translating, you may ask a proofreader to check the translation. If you translate just the lead of an article and it is unsourced because the references supporting it are in the body, you should import the body references, inserting them into the translated lead at the appropriate locations to meet verifiability requirements.
Images
When an article makes use of images from Wikimedia Commons that have text that needs to be translated, such as for diagrams or figures, the request for translation can be made at Commons:Requests for translation, following which the image can be listed at the Wikipedia:Graphics Lab for inserting the translated text.
Style
Articles on a given subject in different languages are typically edited independently, and need not correspond closely in form, style or content.
The English text should be understandable to a wide audience, so use everyday English expressions rather than jargon or foreign expressions. It may be necessary to add material explaining terms or cultural concepts unfamiliar to English-speaking readers.
Avoid being overly influenced by the style of the original. With the exception of quotations, use normal English encyclopedic style, as appropriate for the topic. Use standard English quotation marks, like "these". Do not use “curly” quotes, « guillemets » (as in French), „low-high“ (as in German), or any other national style.
The acceptable style for section headings may vary between articles in different languages, as may the layout of the appendix sections. Follow the order that sections should appear in an article. On English Wikipedia the style of section headings is described in the Manual of Style (MOS) guideline. For example section headers should normally not start with "A", "An", or "The", and the heading ought to be presented in sentence case (Funding of UNESCO projects in developing countries), not title case (Funding of UNESCO Projects in Developing Countries). Section headings should not repeat parts of the page title, or parts of higher level headings. For example, in an article entitled, "Slobovian criminal justice", use section heading "Legislation", not "Criminal legislation in Slobovia". Under section heading "Legislation", use subsection heading "Penal code", not "Penal code legislation" or "Penal code in Slobovia"; and so on.
Although the ordering of information in the main body of an article is not described in detail in the MOS—for example whether the family of a subject of a biography is mentioned in passing in the chronological order of the subject's life, or is placed in a separate section, is left to the discretion of the editors. However there is guidance in the MOS on the appendices of an article. These include section header names, the ordering of the sections and content (see the MOS guideline Layout § Standard appendices and footers). For example the section "See also", if included, ought to contain a bulleted list of internal links to related Wikipedia articles and be placed before the notes and references sections.
Attribution requirements
A translation is a derivative work. Wikipedia articles are under a copyleft license that requires attribution to the original source and authors in all derivative works. How to do this is described on Translating from other language Wikimedia projects.
- The translated article must credit the source article — Add a statement to the edit summary of the target article of your translation providing translation attribution to the authors of the source article, including an interlanguage link to the source (translated-from) article. Example:
Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Exact name of French article]]; see its history for attribution.
- The translated article must credit the source article — Add a statement to the edit summary of the target article of your translation providing translation attribution to the authors of the source article, including an interlanguage link to the source (translated-from) article. Example:
- (optional) Place the {{Translated page}} template on the target article's talk page, for example:
{{Translated page|fr|Exact name of the French article}}– the template also takes some additional optional parameters).
- (optional) Place the {{Translated page}} template on the target article's talk page, for example:
- (optional) Import the revision history of the source into the translated article. If you wish to do so, ask at Wikipedia:Requests for page importation for the page to either be imported into your userspace or over your translated version of the article.
Classroom collaborations
Wikipedia welcomes the involvement of students in article editing. Article translation is particularly well-suited to student involvement. Such efforts provide useful, real-world translation experience for students, who will be motivated by the fact that their work will be seen by thousands of Wikipedia readers. They also benefit Wikipedia readers, who gain access to information about other cultures and peoples.
The Wiki Education Foundation ("Wiki Education"), a spinoff of Wikimedia foundation, acts as an intermediary between higher education and Wikipedia, and facilitates thousands of classroom projects in the U.S. and Canada. For assistance in setting up your classroom project for translating Wikipedia articles into English, please see Wiki Edu: Teach with Wikipedia. For general information about Wiki Education, see Wiki Education Foundation.
Tools
Tools like this one can locate articles that may need translation by finding articles in other languages with no interwiki link to English, but interwiki links to several other languages.
Machine translation
The Content Translation tool may be used to facilitate the translation process. This tool is currently limited to editors with extended confirmed rights (automatically granted to accounts with 30 days tenure and at least 500 edits).
Translation takes work. Machine translation can vary considerably in quality of translation from language to language, and should be used with caution. Machine translation can have difficulty with individual words or expressions for many reasons, including false friends, false cognates, literal translation, neologisms, slang, idiomatic expressions and other unrecognized compounds, words with multiple meanings, words with specialized meanings in certain knowledge domains different from a common meaning of a word in a more general context, unwarranted translation of proper names, and other reasons.
Wikipedia consensus is that an unedited machine translation, left as a Wikipedia article, is worse than nothing. (This is partly because translation templates automatically carry links to machine translations, so readers can easily access machine translations anyway.
Citation templates
As you translate an article, you may encounter citation templates in the original such as {{lien web}} in a French article, or {{cita libro}} in Spanish which have citation parameters in the source language, for example:
{{lien web |auteur= |titre= |éditeur= |pages= |url= |...}}– French cite web template{{cita libro |autor= |título= |editorial= |páginas= |url= |...}}– Spanish cite book template
For most languages, you will have to manually translate the foreign parameter names into the correct parameter name used by the English citation template. However, a shortcut is available in some cases, where you can just paste the foreign citation template as is into the English article, and it will render correctly. This is handled by the CS1 translator module, which can translate four of the most popular templates (cite book, cite web, cite journal, cite news) into English for fourteen languages:
- Arabic, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.
If the non-English citation template is supported by a translator (see list), all you need to do is copy the citation from the source and paste it into the en-wiki article, preview, fix any errors, and publish.
In general, the auto-translator will produce a correctly formatted CS1|2 template from the source that will get substituted by AnomieBot. The translations are not perfect so please make sure that the rendered result is correct. In addition, please add the |language= parameter to the citation template using the Wikipedia language code; e.g. add |language=fr for a French source, |language=de for a German source, and so on.
Userboxes
{{User Translator}} indicates your willingness to participate in this project through translation, copy editing, or other ways.
{{User Translator|es}} produces:
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{{User Translator|hi|proofreader=yes}} produces:
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{{User Translator|ar|project=no}} produces:
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{{User Translator|de|proofreader=yes|project=no}} produces:
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{{User Translator|sd|project=no}} produces:
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{{User Translator|sd|proofreader=yes|project=no}} produces:
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After putting this template on a userpage, the page will be added to the appropriate subcategory of Category:Available translators in Wikipedia. When the proofreader attribute is set to 'yes', the page will also be added to a subcategory of Category:Available proofreaders in Wikipedia.
{{User Translator 2}} works in the same way in the other direction (from English to another language).
See also
- Category:Wikipedia translation templates
- EASE Guidelines for Authors and Translators of Scientific Articles
- Category:Multilingual websites (Editors who translate articles between different versions of Wikipedia can use some of these websites for references.)
- Machine translation
- Template:Notenglish-section
- Wikipedia:Basic copyediting, a task commonly following translation
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Non-English terms
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility#Other languages
- Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English, for pages on the English Wikipedia that will shortly be deleted unless translated
- Wikipedia:Translating German Wikipedia
- Wikipedia:Translators available
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Cross-language Editing and Learning Exchange
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Translation studies
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Intertranswiki, translating content from non-English Wikipedias
External links
- wikt:Wiktionary:Translations
- m:Translation of the week
- MediaWiki translation on translatewiki.net, a localisation platform for translation communities, language communities, and open source projects