Talk:Tech/News/2023/12

Precision

@Quiddity (WMF): I am aware of the discussion on Phab, so I’m not complaining per se, but I feel precision has recently gotten so low it’s actually making translation more difficult.

Take the image caching issue. It looks fine in English, but if you translate it, you get something like “Last week, the loading of thumbnails saw some problems. This affected some users. The cause was some kind of incorrectness in image caching.”

IOW, translate it and you realize you have no clue what it’s talking about. Nothing is concrete ­­— the textbook opposite of plain language. If nothing is concrete, why even bother mentioning it? We might as well nuke this piece of “news”, since it’s saying literally nothing.

The translator is essentially forced to read the Phab ticket to figure out what the problem actually was (so that the translation won’t look too idiotic), and for those of us who don’t want to bother with it (or find the ticket too impenetrable), we end up with what’s essentially gibberish or gobbledygook.

Do we want to publish gobbledygook, or do we actually want to communicate? Al12si (talk) 23:15, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

You're welcome (and encouraged!) to make changes to the English if you find it lacking.

That being said, a large part of translation is (re)wording things to ensure the meaning in conveyed, so I'd expect translators to look at the context (in this case, the linked task) to ensure they do an adequate job. — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 00:21, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

The thing is we’re deceiving ourselves if we continue to think this kind of muddy English text is some kind of communication. It’s not, and it’s going to erode the Wikimedia brand, if that’s the kind of language that will get my point across.

We’re lucky our translators are all volunteers so at least we are motivated to and can read Phab tickets if we want. In professional translation this usually doesn’t happen; context is simply not available. Al12si (talk) 01:22, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi both. My apologies I didn't see this until today.

Overall, ideally, everyone interested can help to both add relevant entries, and also help to improve the wording in each entry in any/every language they know.

That said, it's a difficult set of decisions for balancing each entry's wording (precision, terminology, quantity of detail, etc) given the very diverse sets of both readers and volunteer translators. People get frustrated if we use too much dev-jargon, or when we try to simplify it for broader audiences, or entries are too long, or too short.

As TheresNoTime wrote, the ideal is that Tech News translations can convey useful meaning to the broad less-technical (and technical) members of every language-community.

That is also why we try to get entries in by ~Thursday, so that other people (like you!) can look at them and suggest improvements before it's all "frozen for translation" on ~Friday.

However, additional complexities include: Many languages don't have existing vocabularies for technical jargon, and appreciate all simplifications; Some translators have low-levels of English-fluency; Some translators tend to ignore the longer and/or more technical entries (perhaps because of those previous aspects); The longer an entry is, the more important it might appear to readers; The more long-entries we have, we faster the average-size of entries will grow; The more non-precise words we use the more chances there are for a mis-translation. (Amongst the many things I worry about every week).

In this specific instance: I often struggle to find the 'best' words to communicate entries in the "problems" section, especially because they often involve aspects/terms that most editors (and translators) are very unlikely to be familiar with. I probably would have written something close to what TheresNoTime added, hence I barely touched it. I usually try to summarize "the problem some editors/readers may have experienced or seen reported locally, and the simplified cause", in a way that would be identifiable and make sense (IMO) to a majority of people who read the edition (who may be completely non-technical but nevertheless experienced the problem and want to be reassured that the problem is "known" and/or "fixed").

TL;DR: How would you have written an entry for this? (I.e. the negative feedback is understood, and further suggestions on specific ways to improve entries like this, and entries in general, would be helpful). I see via DeepL/GTranslate that your translation for this entry was roughly "[…] because there was a problem with the coordination between the components, causing the cache to operate improperly." That seems like a reasonable clarification. Is that what you would have wanted the English version to be? Or something else? Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:49, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

@Quiddity (WMF) Yes, that would be the kind of text I believe will be appropriate for Tech News. Simplified but concrete. abstract nouns are the enemy of useful communication so bringing in something concrete (different components) breaks the abstraction; this is not my opinion, many authors in the professional editing space, from different disciplines, have mentioned the same thing. Al12si (talk) 00:59, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

PS: As a translator, I’d say if we find something we don’t understand, we’ll just find a way to figure it out (putting a note in the segment to explain the term would be very helpful). In professional translation this is called “terminology research”. In the open source world I don’t believe we have a name of this but we do the same thing. The main issue here is when things get too abstract it’s actually harder to figure something out and I feel that in recent issues more and more often things have been crossing that line. Al12si (talk) 01:13, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

PPS: I remember something I learnt in a seminar. We were told when we deal with texts that will be translated where translators might have low level of English fluency, it helps to choose words that are more likely to appear in an English dictionary. So short words often might not be the best choice.

Also, when a word is too abstract, often it maps to different meanings in the target language; if the entire paragraph isn’t concrete it becomes very difficult to figure out which meaning is intended. Al12si (talk) 01:23, 21 March 2023 (UTC)