User:TheLonelyPather/Essays/Guide for a translator

You've picked a Wiki article in a different language to translate into English. Thank you! But before you start, remember these tips to make your translation better for the English Wikipedia. A crude translation often creates more work for other English Wikipedia editors. So, be a responsible editor and translator.

This essay is written in simple English for translators who don't speak English as their first language. I will avoid using Wiki-specific words, be brief, and try to explain as much as I can. The ideas are mine, with addition from User:Piotrus and User:Robertsky.

Before translating an article, check ...

• The notability of the topic. An article must meet Wikipedia's notability requirements to be on the English Wikipedia. For example, the "general notability guideline" says

  A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.

To say this in a simpler way:

A topic is good for its own article or list if reliable and independent sources talk a lot about it.

Just because it's on a foreign language Wikipedia doesn't mean it is notable on English Wikipedia; the two Wikipedias are independent.

• Similar content on the English Wikipedia. English Wikipedia and other Wikipedias may organise their content differently. A topic with its own page in one Wikipedia might just be part of a bigger page in English Wikipedia. If so:

1. See if the topic should have its own page in English Wikipedia (go back to the "notability" step above).
2. If it should, go ahead. You can combine content that's already on English Wikipedia with your translation.

• The quality of the original article The original article may lack reliable sources, uses an improper tone, or is biased. In these cases, DON'T directly translate it for English Wikipedia. Wait for others to improve the original article in that language. If you still decide to work on it You must do extra research, add references, and improve the quality of the English article before publishing.

• Whether the page already exists, as a redirect. Sometimes, if you type the name of A onto the English Wikipedia, you will get to article B, where A is usually related to B. This is called a redirect. For example, if you search for a story character's name, sometimes it will bring you to the story's article.

Now, if you made a specific article for A, you should do the following steps to make A an independent article from B:

1. On the English Wikipedia, type the name of A into the search bar. You will arrive at the article B.
2. At the top, below the page title, there will be a line that looks like "(Redirected from Name of A)".
3. Click the blue link. Now you should see a page with the name of A as the title. A line under the title will say "Redirect page".
4. Edit this page. Remove the old content, and copy-paste your translation onto this page.

When translating an article, do ...

Title

• Choose a common name. Look online to find if your topic has a common English name. Usually, use the name found in English newspapers, magazines, academic papers, books, and other sources for your article's title.

If your subject is popular, you will find the common English name easily, but if the subject is less known in English (for example, if it is a historical document, an old book, or an ancient painting), then you need to look harder. In this case, you may be able to find the common English name of your subject through academic sources.

If you have tried your best, but you did not find a common English name, then you can translate the name word-by-word, using the correct romanisation rules. (See WP:COMMONNAME. For romanisation rules, see below.)

• Follow the proper romanisation rules. "Romanisation" is writing words from other languages in English using Latin letters (AaBbCc ...). On English Wikipedia, sometimes there's an agreed way to do this for certain languages (like Chinese and Arabic). If there's no agreement, use the romanisation system that's most common in the countries that use the language.

Style

• Do not use machine translation. Do not put the original text into a translation tool and copy the translation onto Wikipedia.

This includes large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT. LLMs may hallucinate: they may put false or extra information in their translation.

• Use non-English language only when necessary. When translating, focus on making the text easy to read. Include non-English names only when it's necessary. You can also use the {{efn}} template to put non-English language names in a footnote. (See MOS:FULLNAME for an example)

• Check your grammar. You translate an article so other English speakers can read it. If you are not confident about your level of English, you can use machine tools (like this). You may use AI tools to check your grammar, but you should be careful.

Content

• Remove subjective phrasing. Be careful with what you add to Wikipedia. Everything should be based on reliable sources. Don't translate any promotional or biased words, even if the original article says so. (See MOS:PUFFERY and WP:PROMOTION)

• Avoid a "trivia section". A "trivia section" usually exists at the end of an article, and includes small, interesting, non-important facts about the subject. Trivia sections are discouraged on English Wikipedia (see MOS:TRIVIA). Do not include this section in your translation.

Format

• Fix formatting from original article. For example,

• Bold text (see MOS:BOLD)

1. Almost always, only use bold text (''' ... ''' that turns things like this) in the first sentence of the first section ("lede") for the subject of the article.

• Wikilinking (see MOS:LINK)

1. Do not use a wikilink ([[ ... ]] that turns things blue) in section titles.
2. In the prose of the article, do not use the same wikilink twice at different places.
3. Sometimes, a wikilink in the original article does not link to an article that exists on the English Wikipedia. If this is the case, you should use {{ill}}. Instead of putting [[English article title]], use:

   {{ill|English article title|language code|Foreign language article title}}

   A set of language codes can be found here: list of ISO 639 language codes.

• Format your references. It is bad to leave only a website link for your reference. Use templates such as {{cite web}} or {{cite book}} (sometimes the original article will also use these templates).

When using these templates, be sure to include the English translation of the title of the source. Again, look for a title's common English name. If there is not one, you may use a word-by-word translation.

If you are citing a book, you should give the exact page (p. 84), or a range of pages (pp. 84–86) for the information mentioned.

To see exactly how to use these templates, you can look at the source code of a WP:Good article, such as Marie Curie (which uses {{cite web}}) or Genghis Khan (which uses {{cite book}}). You can also ask for help at WP:Teahouse.

After publishing the translation, do ...

• Connect the translation to the original article. Do this if your article is published in the main space (in other words, if the article title does not have the word "Draft"). To connect the articles across different languages, do the following:

1. At the article page, go to the top, and click "Tools" at the top-right corner (sometimes the "Tools" menu will already be on the right).
2. In the "Tools" menu, click "Add interlanguage links".
3. You will see a smaller grey window, with the title "Link with page". For the grey window, in the "Language" section, enter the language code of the original language you translated from, and choose the correct wiki; in the "Page" section, enter the name of the page in the original language.
4. Click "Link with page" in the bottom-right of the grey window. Refresh the page.

• Add categories. If you look at the source code of any Wiki article, in any language, you will see things like [[Category: XXX]] at the end of the code. Wikipedia uses them as labels to organise and sort the articles. For example, if your article is about a person, it might have categories about their birth year and death year.

The English Wikipedia also uses categories. However, the categories of the English Wikipedia do not exactly match the categories of Wikipedia in another language. Therefore, you have to perform the following steps:

1. Make a translation of each category name, and see if there is a matching English category on the English Wikipedia.
2. If not, do not include that category in the translation code.
3. You are free to add English categories to your article if you think they fit.

• Give proper attribution. If you made a translation, you need to let other readers know that the information is not yours, but from another Wikipedia. To give attribution, do the following:

1. Go to the article page in the English Wikipedia. On the top left corner, under the article title, you will see a link "Talk" to the right of "Article" or "Draft". The "Talk" may be red or blue. Click on the "Talk" ...
2. If the "Talk" is red, click "Create source" on the top-right of the screen. If the "Talk" is blue, click "Edit source" on the top-right of the screen.
3. Copy-paste the line below. Replace "SourceLanguageCode" with the language code of the language of the original page, and "SourcePageTitle" with the name of the article in the original language.

   {{translated page|SourceLanguageCode|SourcePageTitle}}

   A set of language codes can be found here: list of ISO 639 language codes.

• Be ready for further discussion. Other people will read the article in English, and they may give their opinion. In some cases, they will make further changes, or ask the community for further changes. Sometimes they will ask to:

• Merge the article with another one (see WP:MERGE). People ask this when they find that the new article is very similar to another article.
• Rename the article (see WP:MOVE). People ask this when they think the there is a better article name, usually a more common English name.

If you completed the steps in this guide carefully, you will rarely encounter these requests. If you do, you are welcome to join these discussions.

If you completed the steps in this guide carefully, people will also be less likely to nominate your article for deletion (see WP:AfD). If someone wants to delete your article, be civil, be calm, and give your reasons in the discussion.

Please remember that the article is not yours, and everyone can edit it (see WP:OWN).