Talk:National Police of Honduras

Fixing rough English

I have been working to upgrade the very rough English (translation from Spanish) & improve the English grammar. If anybody else is watching this page, please read it over carefully. In some cases I found it very difficult to determine the original meaning of a sentence here or there & it's possible that some of my translations are a bit of 'creative writing'.

• I have removed these tags: rough translation|Spanish
• Use dmy dates|date=July 2016
• Copy edit|date=August 2016

Redwidgeon (talk) 04:51, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

@Redwidgeon: Do you speak Spanish? If not, not sure what you mean about "creative translations"; in any case, if you have problems with understanding the original, please {{ping}} me here and ask your question. Note: there are gradations of different language templates you can use besides just "rough", see ones like {{cleanup translation}}, {{translation WIP}}, or {{proofreader needed}}. I probalby would've left {{rough translation}} in place, but I appreciate the work you've been doing, and if you feel one of the other ones would be better, then please go for it. (You can also mark up the article text itself with <!-- html comments --> which won't be visible when reading the page, but will be visible when you edit it; so translation questions can even be embedded in the text inside html comments, to draw the attention of other editors, who may read your question and fix it in place. Still, it's good to mention them on the Talk page as well.)

By the way: I realize you're not the original translator, but wikipedia rules require placement of a tag to acknowledge the source of this material (see WP:COPYWITHIN) so if you wanted to add a {{Translated page}} template here (top of page) that would be good; a tag like this is required (not just 'advisable') because of attribution requirements of copied material. ("Translated" = "copied", for this purpose.) I realize you're not the one responsible, but the original version was by a banned editor, so he can't do it anymore.

Any questions, just {{ping}} me. Mathglot (talk) 21:16, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

@Mathglot: Thanks for your feedback. As you can no doubt tell, I am a very inexperienced editor & tackling this article was my attempt to follow general WP advice to 'be bold' ;-)

In answer to your specific comments:

• yes, I understand a little Spanish. I can, for example, tell when an entire Spanish phrase somehow missed translation & by accepting some cautious assistance from Google translate, I can usually make a stab at it
• I really had no idea about the variety of language templates; I will try to study this a bit & see if I can use them more accurately
• I don't understand the use of 'a tag to acknowledge the source of this material' but again, I will try to study up & see if I can figure it out.
• I do understand your directions about adding hidden tags to flag ongoing translation questions - very helpful, thanks!

I appreciate your encouragement & detailed advice; may not get around to re-tackling this right away but will add it to my editing to-do list. Redwidgeon (talk) 03:37, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

I restored all the tags you removed. (Well, someone else restored the dmy one.) While you're working to fix up a translation, keep tags that are accurate in place. I find the article still extremely rough. (It was created by a banned sockpuppet using machine translation during a period when the Content Translation Tool was misconfigured, and allowed articles to be swiftly created by people who knew no Spanish at all. Of course, they started out as complete junk, and most of the articles created by this sockpuppet have since been deleted. But it's perfectly okay, desirable even, for other editors to come in and fix it up, as you are doing. But as long as the article is still very sketchy in its English, please leave the tags in place. If you would like to have help from Spanish speakers, try Wikipedia:Translators available#Spanish-to-English, or Category:Translators es-en. There is also a Wikipedia "ambassador" for Spanish here. Mathglot (talk) 09:09, 6 June 2017 (UTC)