wikitranslate is a tool specificially designed for aiding the translation of Wikipedia pages using CAT tools.

Wikipedia pages used a type of markup called Wiki markup or wikitext. It is a pure text based formatting that is similar to Markdown or reStructuredText.

This wiki markup (since it's made up of punctuation) makes it very difficult for CAT tools to understand the difference between the segment text (that needs to be translated) and formatting. wikitranslate converts the wiki markup into pseudo-HTML that can be ingested and translated. The result HTML can then be converted back into wiki markup to be uploaded as a new page.

Installation and Updating

If you have not yet downloaded wikitransate you can download the latest binary from the releases page.

Note: You will not be able to open the file downloaded. It will only work inside your Terminal.

Once installed you can use the built-in updater:

$ wiktranslate update
The current version is v0.2.0
Finding the latest version... v0.3.1
Downloading the latest version... Done (5.43 MB)
Installing... Done

Usage

To prepare a wiki page for translating, provide the URL:

wikitranslate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Bull_Terrier

This will generate a Staffordshire_Bull_Terrier.html in your Downloads folder. This is the document to upload or import into you CAT tools.

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Once the translation is complete you will need to download or export the new HTML document and use wikitranslate to convert it back into the wiki markup by providing the new HTML file:

wikitranslate Staffordshire_Bull_Terrier.html

Tip: You can drag the file into the Terminal to insert the full path to the HTML document.

This will generate a Staffordshire_Bull_Terrier.html.txt in the same folder as Staffordshire_Bull_Terrier.html. You can now open the text file to get the wiki markup for submission.

Considerations for the Intermediate Markup

1. The HTML file should never be manually edited. Especially in earlier versions of wikitranslate where the internals expect certain attributes and may not be able to translate back to wiki makrup accurately, or at all if it has been edit incorrectly.

2. wikitranslate maintains the complete life-cycle of the document and is intended to only work with wiki markup. It is not made for processing HTML from other sources.

3. The HTML generated is intended for CAT tools and not viewing directly. While regular HTML elements are used for most formatting it also uses custom tags and other markers that make the processing back to wikimarkup possible but also hide (from view) some of the page elements.

4. The content of references (<ref>) and unformatted blocks (<nowiki>) are concealed, they will not appear in your translation but will be returned exactly as they were and in the same place in the new wikimarkup.

5. The layout of formatting will not be maintained. A good example of this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table that use the short-hand !! for adding multiple columns to the same line. This will always be expanded in the output to use one line per column, however this may change in the future.