Content Translation: impact beyond numbers

In the past I wrote about the design process of Content Translation and how the tool was born. The tool has been growing since then. While still in beta, it is showing a positive impact already as it was highlighted in the recent Wikimedia Foundation annual report.

Last summer the project crossed the milestone of one hundred thousand articles translated. This video celebrates the achievement:

It is really great to see that the tool is frequently used by translators. However, the biggest impact of a tool is not always captured just by numbers.

I was excited to hear that the Medical Translation Task Force was interested in trying our tool. They are a group of users devoted to reduce the language barriers for health knowledge. Having access to essential health information, such as vaccines, can make a big difference on many people’s life.

After a trial, it was amazing to read that they boosted their productivity by 17% by using the Content Translation tool. This means more people will have access to essential information in the language they understand.

Translating articles about vaccines is something I could not have contributed much directly. So it is really great to see how through design you can help others to do so and contribute a bit on relevant but unexpected areas.

Another less known aspect about Content Translation is that by using it you are also contributing for translation services to get better in the future. As you create a translation, your contribution is published as a collection of translation examples (technically known as parallel corpora). This information is publicly exposed through an API and is very useful for researchers and developers of machine translation services in order to improve their approaches or create new services.

Spreading the word

We want to help as many people as possible to break language barriers in their different areas of interest. The possibilities of the Content Translation tool have been discussed in different venues and we are always interested to spread the word more.

Last June we organised an event for the San Francisco design week. I had the opportunity to talk with people from the Google team that worked on the Google Translation toolkit. We had an interesting discussion about the design principles that aligned our tool with the way people translate on Wikipedia.

Santhosh, a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Language team, presented the tool at the Unicode Conference where attendees were interested in the technical challenges the tool solves. Content Translation was also presented to a very different audience at “Translating for EU" an event organised by the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission.

The tool has been also used in many other workshops, editathons and university courses around the world. We love to hear your stories about your experience using the tool, so feel free to ping us.

Next steps

As the tool becomes more mature we are improving several technical aspects but we wanted also to polish different aspects to make the tool more consistent with the evolving Wikimedia design guidelines.

These design improvements include the evolution of the visual design of the tool as well as improvements in some of the workflows such as making the process of starting a new translation more fluent. You can read more about this initial design refresh on the Wikimedia blog.

Another area where the tool has been evolving is in template support. Wikipedia uses templates to format content in a consistent way. the infoboxes (tables with quick facts that you can find at the beginning of many articles are just one example).

Initially the tool didn’t provide support for templates because of their complexity. After several explorations we came with a concept based on the same principles we applied to the rest of the tool: supporting translation in a visual way, making it possible to translate as much as you need and getting the support of translation services when available.

Initial research based on a prototype showed it was a promising approach and we added initial support in the tool. There is still a long way to go in this front, but we are happy to have improved already the support of a frequently requested aspect.