Wikinews:Water cooler/assistance/archives/2016/August

Translating Articles

I was wondering if I'm allowed to translate articles from other languages, such as Serbian. If so, how should I go about it? --Queen Laura (talk) 17:22, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

@Queen Laura: Do you mean, submit articles here from other Wikinews projects (such as Serbian), or use sources written in non-English languages (such as Serbian)?

• Other Wikinews projects have different processes and standards, so we can't (for most purposes) treat them as trust-worthy sources in themselves. From time to time an article from, say, French or Spanish Wikinews gets translated into English and submitted here, which means the text gets translated, the sources from the other-language article are cited, and a template is used in the Sources section to acknowledge that the article is at least partly translated from the other project. Sometimes English sources are also added to help. But then it has to be reviewed here — which brings me to the other question, use of non-English sources.
• Non-English sources are difficult for us to handle during review. Keep in mind that automatic translation technology is really horrible. Reviewers do in-depth study of sources, and all nuance is lost in automatic translation, but it's worse than that. Automatic translation can easily produce nonsense, or, worse, can easily produce something that seems reasonable but doesn't mean at all what the original meant; it may even have the opposite meaning, or an unrelated meaning. There are two main cases where we can use non-English sources: where the information we need to get from them is very simple and with careful study we can be quite sure of it even across the language barrier, and where we're gathering a direct quote (which works especially well if we have either a native speaker to help us with its translation or a translation provided elsewhere that we're sure is the same quote). In some cases, a trusted reporter can help us with the translation of a source, but that's a laborious process that I've only seen done successfully a few times.

--Pi zero (talk) 17:48, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

So I could, theoretically, translate an article as a source for inspiration; and, occasionally, translate articles completely. Great! Thanks for the help! --Queen Laura (talk) 18:25, 11 August 2016 (UTC)