Best practices for Content Translation events/fr

La traduction de contenu est une fonctionnalité de Wikipédia qui aide les éditeurs à traduire les articles entre les langues.

Organiser des ateliers de traduction, une présentation de Blossom Ozurumba à Wikimania 2019

La traduction de contenu peut être une introduction rapide et efficace à l'édition de Wikipédia pour les personnes qui connaissent plusieurs langues. Grâce à la traduction de contenu, un tout nouvel éditeur qui connaît deux langues peut créer un article Wikipédia complet avec formatage, images et références sans pratiquement aucune préparation, en moins d'une heure. C'est aussi, de par sa nature, une bonne contribution à l'amélioration des connaissances à travers les langues et les cultures. Il convient donc parfaitement aux ateliers de rédaction.

Cependant, les personnes qui dirigent l'atelier doivent faire quelques préparatifs pour que l'événement se déroule sans heurts et efficacement.

Sauf indication contraire, toutes les meilleures pratiques pour la gestion des événements Wikimedia en général s'appliquent également aux événements de traduction, vous devez donc les lire et les utiliser. Consultez la page Modèles d'apprentissage, et sélectionnez "Événements".

Sélection du lieu

Tout endroit calme où il est possible de s'asseoir confortablement et de taper sur un ordinateur est parfait.

Il n'est pas nécessaire que l'endroit dispose d'ordinateurs. Si les gens peuvent apporter leurs propres ordinateurs portables, c'est bien car ils seront à l'aise avec leurs propres appareils. Si les gens ne peuvent pas apporter d'ordinateurs portables et que vous ne pouvez pas trouver un lieu qui dispose de postes informatiques, essayez de trouver un service qui puisse louer des ordinateurs. Dans tous les cas, consultez les notes ci-dessous sur la configuration du clavier.

Les lieux particulièrement recommandés sont les bibliothèques, les écoles et les universités, notamment ceux qui disposent de livres sur place pouvant être utilisés par les rédacteurs et les traducteurs d'articles: dictionnaires, livres sur la grammaire et le style des langues, encyclopédies, livres sur l'histoire et la biographie, etc. En particulier, il est fortement recommandé d'avoir des dictionnaires lors de tout événement de traduction. Voir aussi les notes ci-dessous.

Personnes à inviter

Toute personne connaissant au moins deux langues peut participer à un tel événement. Vous pouvez choisir de vous concentrer sur la traduction dans une seule langue, mais ce n'est pas obligatoire: Si vous organisez un atelier de traduction dans le cadre d'un événement international tel que Wikimania, ou si de nombreuses langues sont parlées dans la région où se tient l'atelier, les participants peuvent traduire dans différentes langues.

Cela dit, il est toujours très utile d'avoir à cet événement au moins une personne qui maîtrise parfaitement la langue vers laquelle les participants traduisent et la langue à partir de laquelle les gens traduisent. Cette personne peut être un linguiste, un professeur de langues ou un traducteur professionnel. Il peut même s'agir d'une personne qui n'est pas certifiée professionnellement ou académiquement, mais qui aime simplement la langue et qui est bonne pour lire et écrire dans cette langue et pour utiliser des dictionnaires, des livres de grammaire et des guides de style. Ce n'est pas grave si cette personne est également l'organisateur de l'événement. S'il y a plusieurs personnes de ce type, c'est encore mieux.

Il est normal d'inviter des personnes qui n'ont aucune expérience de l'édition de Wikipédia, mais au moins une personne doit avoir une expérience de l'écriture dans Wikipédia. Si possible, il devrait s'agir d'une personne qui a de l'expérience dans la rédaction de Wikipédia dans la langue dans laquelle la plupart des participants traduiront. S'il est difficile de trouver une telle personne, il peut s'agir d'une personne expérimentée dans la rédaction de Wikipédia dans une autre langue. Vous devez avoir au moins un wikipédien expérimenté pour dix personnes inexpérimentées. Plus il y a de personnes expérimentées, mieux c'est.

Si vous souhaitez axer votre événement sur la traduction d'articles sur un sujet particulier, tel que "Les villes de notre pays", "Les personnages célèbres de l'histoire de la Thaïlande", "Maladies et vaccins", etc.

Il est moins essentiel, mais tout à fait utile, d'avoir au moins une personne qui a des droits d'administrateur, afin qu'il soit possible de résoudre les problèmes de comptes, de pages protégées, etc. Si un administrateur ne peut pas être présent en personne lors de l'événement, il est conseillé d'être en contact avec lui à distance par téléphone, messagerie instantanée ou courrier électronique. Enfin, il est également utile de disposer d'une personne capable d'analyser, de signaler et de résoudre des problèmes techniques généraux concernant la syntaxe du wiki, les claviers, les polices de caractères, les gadgets, les bogues logiciels, etc.

Get familiar with the policy at Steward requests/Global permissions#Requests for global IP block exemption. As of 2022, this is acutely necessary for events, especially in some countries (see the page No open proxies/Unfair blocking for details).

Enfin, il est également utile de disposer d'une personne capable de résoudre les problèmes techniques généraux liés à la syntaxe du wiki, aux modèles, aux claviers, aux polices, aux gadgets, etc. pour signaler les bogues logiciels et transmettre des commentaires aux développeurs.

Avant l'événement

Se préparer

It is recommended to plan at least two hours for an article translation workshop. One hour may be enough, but it may feel rushed, and the quality of the published articles may be compromised. Two hours or more will give the organizers and the participants more time to relax, discuss difficult points, make the necessary corrections, and publish great articles.

Make sure you know how to type in your language. Some languages can be easily typed on any computer, but some others have difficulties, especially in India, South East Asia, and some countries in Africa. If people bring their own laptops, try to learn as much as possible about configuring keyboards for the relevant language on common operating systems, especially Windows, and also Mac, Chromebook, and Linux.

Make sure that you are experienced with Content Translation yourself. Translate at least one article using it, and preferably more than one. Test it again a day before the event: It sometimes happens that recent software changes in Content Translation or in the gadgets on the wiki itself change or break some functionality.

Read and re-read the Content Translation user manual, even if you are an experienced user of Content Translation, and even if you had read it already. In addition to the technical description, it includes useful advice that you should pass on to the workshop participants. If the user manual is not translated into the language that most of the participants know, consider translating it by clicking "Traduire cette page" at the top of the page.

Check whether the Content Translation software itself is localized into the language that most of the participants know. To do this, log into your account on translatewiki.net and check the status of the Content Translation project. If the page says "Rien à traduire", then everything is ready! If you see rows of English strings, then not everything is translated. Even though it is not a requirement, it is highly recommended having the user interface of Content Translation completely translated in translatewiki.net two weeks before conducting an article translation event. This will make the interface easier and more familiar for the participants, and it will help everybody in the event use consistent terminology for words like "translate", "publish", "link", "template", "reference", etc. For general tips on using translatewiki.net, see the post Translating the software that powers Wikipedia on the Wikimedia blog.

Prepare a list of articles that should be translated. It is usually OK to encourage the participants to decide what they want to write about (see below), but sometimes people don't know what to choose, so it's good to have a list of articles to translate as a fallback. One fun way to do it is to choose several topics that may be relevant for the participants, such as sports, music, animals, or history, then write the articles' titles on cards, and hand them out in the beginning of the event. Check that the articles don't yet exist in the target language.

Pendant la traduction, les gens se posent souvent des questions sur la traduction de mots difficiles, sur l'orthographe et la grammaire, etc. Apportez des dictionnaires et des livres sur la grammaire et le style lors de l'événement, ou préparez une liste de sites Internet où vous pourrez trouver ce type de matériel.

Préparation des ordinateurs

If you are providing the computers that the participants will use, check that they have an up-to-date version of a modern web browser: Firefox, Chrome, Edge, or Safari. Also, check that JavaScript is enabled. Content Translation uses a lot of modern JavaScript technologies. It is likely that it will not work on old versions of browsers, so update them if needed. If possible, actually try to log in to your Wikipedia account and run Content Translation to see that it works.

Make sure that all the computers that will be used have a keyboard configured for the languages that will be used at the event. Sometimes computers are configured only with an English keyboard.

If these computers are in a place such as a school, a library, or a community center, ask the IT person to do this. If people are bringing their own laptops, tell them to do it before they come.

Ask the participants

Ask all the participants to create Wikipedia accounts. Creating them all on the day of the event will cause unnecessary delays in the beginning of the workshop. Also, creating many accounts from the same network may be blocked.

Ask all the participants to test that their accounts work in the Wikipedia in the source language and in the target language. Occasionally, an account can be created in one language, but auto-creation in the other language may be blocked. If anybody has issues with this, contact an administrator. It may also be a good idea to test that they can edit in Wikidata and in Commons.

Ask all the participants to decide which articles do they want to translate, and encourage them to read the whole source article. It is also a good idea to pick more than one, because it may happen that an article already exists in the target language, or being translated by another translator.

If participants bring their own laptops, tell them to do the things described in the section "Preparing the computers" above: update the web browser and configure the keyboard for the language they'll use. Many people don't know how to do it themselves, so try to learn how to do it on as many operating systems as possible so that you'll be able to help them.

During the event

Introducing new editors to Wikipedia

One of the advantages of Content Translation is that it allows the workshop leader to skip long introductions about wiki syntax, uploading files, or copyrights.

Nevertheless, it is highly recommended giving the participants a short introduction:

• A brief history of Wikipedia
• What is a wiki
• What is an encyclopedia (as opposed to a blog, a news website, a social network, etc.)
• What are the copyright principles: Free culture is great; translation of Wikipedia articles between languages is allowed; copying text from other websites without an explicit permission is forbidden; uploading photos is allowed only if they are your own or if they are under a compatible license (when using Content Translation, only images that are already on Commons will be auto-adapted, so image copyright shouldn't be an issue)

If the focus of your event is just translation, this introduction is supposed to take less than fifteen minutes.

If all the participants are experienced Wikipedians, you can skip this introduction.

Introducing Content Translation

After the general introduction, do a short demo of Content Translation. Important points to mention:

• Translate paragraph by paragraph.
• Machine translation is available for some languages, but not for all of them. If machine translation is available for the language in question:
  • Don't publish machine translation without fixing its mistakes!
  • Show how to turn machine translation on and off.
• It's possible to paste the source text into the paragraph, or to start from an empty paragraph.
• Images can be automatically transferred by clicking on them, but you have to translate the caption.
• Links are adapted automatically, and can also be added and removed manually.
• References (footnotes) are adapted automatically, but may need manual tweaking.
• Content Translation creates the first revision of the article. After this, the article can be edited just like any other article.
• For experienced Wikipedians: Don't use wiki syntax.

Make sure that you understand all these points yourself, and that you are able to use them and demonstrate them.

You should also explain why translating Wikipedia articles is useful even if many people know major languages like English, French, or Russian. You should adapt this explanation to your country and to the event participants. Some possible points to mention:

• Many people don't know these major languages, and translation will make useful knowledge more accessible.
• For school children, it is easier to read Wikipedia in a language that is familiar to them from school or home.
• Even editions of Wikipedia in very large languages don't cover all the topics in the world. It is possible to translate from the local language of your culture into a major language, so that people from other cultures will be able to learn about your culture.
• Increasing the amount of online content in a language will contribute to the language's standardization and development.

Translating

Make sure that everybody enables Content Translation in the preferences, show people how to enter the Content Translation dashboard (hover on "Contributions"), and then just tell people to start translating!

Tell people not to translate the same article as you are showing in the demo. If several people want to translate the same article, only one user should start its translation, and the other people should gather around the same computer and work as a team. It is technically impossible for several users to translate the same article with Content Translation. (This may become possible in the future, but there is no target date for this yet.)

During the translation phase, people will likely need help with certain issues:

• Translating difficult words: Encourage people to talk to each other and give each other friendly tips about the language. Language experts, as well as dictionaries and grammar books, will be especially useful at this point.
• Using Content Translation: adapting and adding links, images, templates, references, etc.
• Publishing: Some wikis are configured to disallow publishing to the main space for new users. If this happens, tell people to publish to the user space by clicking the gear icon.
• Fixing reference formatting: Sometimes reference formatting becomes jumbled or references go missing following publication (this is a complex, known technical issue, which is gradually being addressed). After finishing the translation, it is often necessary to fix these issues manually.

If you can, have a board with a list of articles that people have started translating, and mark those that people have completed. It's a fun activity, it encourages participants to complete the translation and publish the page, and after the event it can be posted on blogs and social media.

Encourage people to write good translations and correct them both during the translation, and after publishing the first version. For example, it's OK to skip some paragraphs if they are unreliable, too difficult, or not so relevant for people who read in the target language, and it's OK to add more locally relevant paragraphs after publishing.

Collecting feedback

It's very important to collect as much feedback as possible from the participants:

• What works well? What are you enjoying?
• Is anything difficult in things like creating an account, logging in, choosing an article to translate, starting the translation, reading the source text, writing the translation, publishing, etc.?
• Are there any particular bugs in the software? When there is doubt whether something is a bug or not a bug, always note it—it's important to report anything that could be a bug to the developers. When noting a possible bug, write down as many details as possible: the username, the language, which article was translated, which operating system and browser the people were using, what did they expect to happen, and what happened instead. See the page How to report a bug for tips about reporting bugs effectively.

For more on observing users and collecting and reporting feedback, see this English Wikipedia Signpost article: How to make editing workshops useful, even if participants don't stick around.

After the event

• Ask the participants for more feedback: What did they enjoy and what worked well? What didn't work well? Do they feel that they achieved something? Did their opinion about Wikipedia change?
• Consider a quick post-event survey: here's a survey template you can use as-is, or change and adapt to your needs. Also, if you'd like help designing and running a survey, reach out to the Language Team, and it will be glad to assist you refine the questions, set up the survey, and provide a link that you can distribute to event participants.
• Ask the participants to tell their friends about this.
• Ask the participants to translate more at home.
• Submit all the relevant feedback that you collected to the developers of Content Translation in an email, as bug reports in Phabricator, or using any other means of communication that is convenient for you.
• Share at least a few translated articles and other achievements of the event on social media or other community channels. For example: "thanks to Maria, you can now read the article Korean massage in Wikipedia in Spanish" (make sure to replace "Maria", "Korean massage", and "Spanish" with actual names of the translator, the article title, and the target language). By doing it, people can give rewarding kudos to the editors (new or experienced) and other users can check the work done. You also spread the idea of the event to other potential event organizers. On Twitter, you may mention Content Translation's account: @WhatToTranslate.
• Write a public report as a wiki page or a blog post about the event: who participated, how many articles were written, and so on. Here's one example from an event in New York City: :w:en:Wikipedia:LaGuardia Community College/Reports. If the event was done as part of a work of a Wikimedia chapter, another affiliate, or somehow funded by a grant, you probably have to do it, and you will know in what format does this report have to be. However, it's a good idea to write such a report in any case, even if it's not required. It will raise awareness of such events, and it will also help you prepare for the next events.

Finally, if you used this page for preparing your event, and you have more ideas that are not covered here, please edit this page and add them!

Thank you for using Content Translation and running translation events!

Voir aussi

• Content Translation development project page on mediawiki.org
• Getting newcomers into Wikipedia with Content Translation, a post on the Wikimedia blog about one of the first Content Translation workshops