Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 2/Translating articles

And finally, translation. Most of you speak more than one language, and translating articles is a great way of contributing to free knowledge. It doesn't have to be, by the way, from English into another language. It can also be from another language into English. Not all wisdom starts in English. It's never a bad idea to remind people that the vast, overwhelming majority of people on the planet do not speak any English at all. This is easy to forget for those of us who do speak English. But numerically, just taking the sheer population on the planet, most people do not speak English at all.

So if you do have more than one working language, you can help Wikipedia by translating articles. And there is a very convenient tool for that. I hope at least some of you don't know it, so it'll be new for you. And you can start this tool by clicking on your user icon in Wikipedia to get recommendations.

Or you can look at an article and see what languages may be missing. If we look at this article, for example, about Harriet Patterson. You can see that this article has no other languages. If you look here at the top right, it says Add languages. This article only exists in English, not in French, not in German, not in Zulu.

If I speak one of these other languages, I can start translating this article right here, right now. Whereas if I click a more central article, like the city of Philadelphia in the United States, you can see that an article about Philadelphia exists in 164 languages. Which is great, but still not every language conceivable. I don't know, is there a Zulu article about it? No, there is not. So if you speak Zulu, you could translate the article about Philadelphia.

Okay, but in this case, there's not even any other article about Harriet Patterson. And I could just select Translate this page and be taken to the translation interface. And I could pick the target language, the language that I speak that I would like to translate into. In this case, it automatically suggested for me to use the Hebrew language, these characters that you cannot read say "Hebrew". And I can just click on "Start Translation". If that's what I want to do, I click Start Translation. And then taken again to this split-screen view. Don't be alarmed: Hebrew is written from right to left... I can just start translating.

So, this sentence says Harriet Patterson was an American landscape architect, and I'm just going to click on the empty paragraph here. In some languages, it even offers you a machine translation, and invites you, of course, as a human native speaker, to correct it. Because a machine translation, as I hope everybody knows, absolutely mustn't be relied on. So in this case, it's actually a pretty good job. This is actually almost perfect, this machine translation. So I can just correct this little thing and leave the rest as it is and click on the title for Early life and education. And this is not a good translation. So I will rewrite it. I will just switch to Hebrew. And change it to something else. Okay, the point is, I understand you cannot read this, but I can just start translating. I can just start typing and the system does its best to convert links and footnotes. So if I click on this paragraph, you can see that it made what was a link in the original a link here, where it could. For example, the University of Chicago here, this is a link here in the Hebrew. You'll have to believe me that this links to the University of Chicago, whereas the Francis Parker School in Chicago is a gray link here. You see, this is in gray, not in blue, because Hebrew Wikipedia, the target Wikipedia, doesn't have an article about the Francis Parker School.

It does have an article about the University of Chicago. I hope that's clear. Right. So where it finds an equivalent article, it automatically links it in the target language. And if you're translating into a smaller Wikipedia like, say, Igbo, it's likely that many of the links will not be blue, will not be existing articles, but that's okay. But it tries to do what it can for you. And it also copies these citations. As you can see this one and two, these are citations that it copies to the sources.

There's plenty to to learn and explain about this interface. But again I just wanted to open the window in case you haven't encountered this yet. This link here will explain more about the content translation tool. If you've never used it, and you do speak comfortably more than one language, this could be a really great way to help free knowledge in other languages.

So this is an example, a screenshot, of a French article. You can see here this lady is an African singer. And there's only an article about her in French. She sings in French, she's francophone. And so French Wikipedia has an article about her, but even English Wikipedia does not. So I could click Add language and translate from the French into English if I speak both languages.

By the way, here at the bottom you see another example of giving credit. I'm giving credit to the person who took this picture. So I click Add language. I click Translate this page. In this case it's from French into English. And I can start translating. The first sentence in French here translates into this sentence in English. Maybe this is easier to understand than the Hebrew example, but you can do this and you can find things to translate, for example, by clicking this icon here. You can see here, this is the main page of French Wikipedia. And if I click this user icon at the top right, you can see that there's an option called Translations. And if you click on Translations you're taken here. And you are shown these four options. Here are articles that exist on French, because I started from French Wikipedia. That exist on French and don't exist in English and are relatively popular. So these are articles people are reading on the French Wikipedia, not just an absolutely random article, which might be a really obscure topic. These are articles a lot of people are reading in French that are missing on English Wikipedia. So the system is helping me find something meaningful to work on.