Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Working with translations

One of the benefits of having Wikipedias in different languages is the way that they can complement and facilitate each other's growth. Some topics are not well covered in writings in certain languages, and often only exist in the language of the country associated with the topic. However, translation allows readers to have the opportunity to learn about topics that are not written about in English textbooks, through the translation of articles compiled by non-English language Wikipedians from various texts. This allows an article to be created or expanded without having to do the research, and can are extremely useful when other Wikipedias have a superior article at hand. There are various techniques to employ and pitfalls to avoid in harnessing the power of translation.

The pitfalls of translation
It can be difficult for someone who is not fluent in a particular language to pick up the subtleties of it, such as a pejorative tone, or a cultural reference. Another issue arises when the one word can have multiple meanings in English.

[Overly] literal translations
Last year, the featured article about the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc was translated into Vietnamese and the sentence 'Ellen Hammer described the event as having "evoked dark images of persecution and horror corresponding to a profoundly Asian reality that passed the understanding of Westerners." was translated literally, particularly the phrase "that passed the understanding of Westerners" when it should have been a Vietnamese equivalent "that Westerners were unable to comprehend". (This was explained here)

Wordplays
Cultural issues can manifest themselves in terms of wordplays. Here is an example:

"Khí tượng" is a Sino-Vietnamese word for a meteorologist. By itself, "tượng" is Sino-Vietnamese for an elephant&mdash;it can also mean a statue. Nowadays, Sino-Vietnamese words are largely confined to formal use, such as in religious texts, poetry, speeches, presentations and so forth. "Voi" is now the generally used word for elephant, while "tượng" is mostly used in contexts like the elephant in Chinese chess. Nevertheless, when a meteorologist makes an incorrect prediction, they are often derisively called a "Khí voi". In itself the word makes no sense but is a wordplay with a Sino-Vietnamese portion subbed out. This is because "tượng" is a more formal and "scholarly" wording for the "educated classes", while "voi" is more likely to be used by a peasant, and as such "Khí voi" is used to mock the meteorologist as being unskilled. Vietnamese is one language that has many such humorous wordplays, which can catch out those not specifically aware of such usage. They may be such similar languages.

Multiple meanings
Likewise, some words can have many meanings, and the machine translation can go wrong when translating from A to B when the word in language A can have many meanings. Furthermore, two words in combination can mean something rather different than just the sum of the two constituents. For instance, "Pháp" in Vietnamese can mean "France" or "dharma". The google machine translation prefers the former, so any attempts to feed in a Vietnamese language piece into the machine will erroneously translate "Phật Pháp" [lit Buddha dharma, i.e., the Buddha’s teachings] as "Buddha France".

Thus, simply relying on a machine translation can be fraught with danger if one has no knowledge of one of the languages in question, although for a person who does have ability, it can be save quite a lot of time, if paired with human intervention and/or a dictionary. According to Translation,

"Machine translation, especially between unrelated languages (e.g. English and Japanese), produces very low quality results. Wikipedia consensus is that an unedited machine translation, left as a Wikipedia article, is worse than nothing.."

Preserving the original quote
In order to maintain the originality of a quote, it is necessary to eliminate cycles of translation. For example, in the case of translating an article from language B to language A, if some of the quotes in the language B article was from a speech by a politician in language A, then it is better to try and find the speech in a source in language A, so that the translated article can faithfully reproduce the quote, as a cycle of translations can introduce paraphrasing.

For instance, when Thich Quang Duc was translated onto the Vietnamese Wikipedia, the original quotes made by the various Vietnamese was retrieved from Vietnamese textbooks and reproduced verbatim, rather than translating the translation of the English language academic in question. The former is a higher-quality option.

Copyright and neutrality issues
To comply with the GFDL licensing (copyright), the fact that an article is a translation (i.e., that the idea and structure of the article was not by the person making the translation edit) needs to be acknowledged. This can be done by either leaving a comment to such effect in the edit summary, or by adding on the talk page.

Note that as Wikipedia is not a reliable source, translating from another Wikipedia will propagate any problematic content or lack of balance onto the English Wikipedia. Thus, it is important that unsourced or unreliably sourced content is taken with skepticism, and that thought is given to whether the original article is biased. As most languages are only present to a significant extent in one or two countries, articles from the corresponding Wikipedias are likely to reflect the prevailing outlook in those countries, which are more likely to give rise to issues of nationalist or religious bias due to the overwhelming majority of editors being a certain ethnicity and religion.

Getting help
So, where can one go for help with translations?

Well, the Military history project has its own in-house coordination centre, at logistics. One possible benefit of the in-house system is that the users listed have a declared interest in military history articles, so they may be more enthusiastic than the average person with the same language qualifications.

Another option is to go to the Wikipedia in the language that you wish to translate from, or the WikiProject of the countries that use the said language, and ask for help, particularly those in that project who have a history of editing military history articles and/or are the most fluent in the language in question. In some cases, the WikiProject of the associated country can be very sparse&mdash;this is particularly true of many Asian nation-state WikiProjects, so visiting the corresponding Wikipedia may be necessary. A list of translators can also be found at Translation.

One generic method of getting an article translated is by adding. This places a template on the top of the article that advises the reader that the English language article can be expanded from the sister article, and sets up a link to a google machine translation. However, this can be a very slow waiting process, especially if nobody is interested in the article.