Help:Translation
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This is a help page that describes how to copy and translate text from a Wikipedia foreign language article into English. The text may be for a completely new article (see Help:New article), or to expand an existing English Wikipedia article. If text is copied over from another Wiki then appropriate attribution must be placed in the edit history of the article (see the guide line Copying within Wikipedia §Translating from other language Wikimedia projects)
This help page does not currently cover how to translate from English Wikipedia to a foreign language. For help with that see Help:Translate us.
License 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 new, translated article must credit the source article:
- (a) Provide in the first edit summary of the target article a statement of your translation, together with 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.
- (a) Provide in the first edit summary of the target article a statement of your translation, together with an interlanguage link to the source (translated-from) article. Example:
Additionally you may:
- (b) Place the template {{Translated page}} for example
{{Translated page|fr|Exact name of the French article}}on the target article's talk page ({{Translated page}}also takes some additional optional parameters).
- (b) Place the template {{Translated page}} for example
You are not required to import the revision history, but if you wish to do so, ask at Help:Requests for page importation for the page to either be imported into your userspace or over your translated version of the article. (See also Help:Copying within Wikipedia, and its section at Help:RIA if you find a translation that failed to provide mandatory copyright attribution.)
How to translate
Articles on a given subject in different languages are typically edited independently, and need not correspond closely in form, style or content. 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.
The English text should be understandable to a wide audience, so – other things being equal – 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.
The acceptable style for section headings may vary between articles in different languages, as may the layout of the appendix sections.
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)—see the MOS sections: Section headings and indirectly Article titles for guidance.
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.
Translating references
There are auto-translators for some cs1|2 templates ({{cite book}}, {{cite web}}, etc) for the following languages:
- Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
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.
Supported non-English templates are listed at Module:CS1 translator. The process is
- copy the original reference from the source and paste it in the en.wiki article
- replace the template name, e.g. change da:Skabelon:Kilde bog to Template:cite book/Danish
- preview, fix any errors, and publish.
Content Translation Tool
File:Content Translation Screencast (English).webm 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). Please see more information at Help:Content translation tool.
Avoid unedited machine translations
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.)