Talk:Trichomonas tenax

Speedy deletion declined

Since the creator of this article removed the speedy deletion template, stating for the record here that I was about to decline it. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:24, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Hidden translation

There may be errors of fact in this article, even in the case of assertions that have reliable sources, because this article is a hidden translation: previously poorly translated, then papered over with proper English grammar and style. The grammar may now be correct, but the medical assertions might not be. (I'm not a domain expert, and for all I know, experts have already fixed any errors of medical fact introduced by the translation, in which case, please ignore this.)

This article stems from an earlier, rough or machine translation from the French (see box above) that once contained wording that varied from awkward, to amusing, to incomprehensible. Subsequent editors have come along and patched up the grammar so that the article now reads like correct English. On the one hand, that's good; but on the other hand, it may hide a real problem, because any errors of medical fact simultaneously introduced by the poor translation are unlikely to be caught by well-meaning, monolingual editors not expert in periodontology. Thus, even sourced material may now be incorrect, despite the fact that it was correct in French, especially if the source reference is also in French and not so easily verified by domain experts here at en-wiki. (If the original reference in the French article was in English, as is often the case, there can still be a problem if a mistranslated assertion based on it inverts the facts; however, that case is easier for monolinguals to discover and fix.)

I don't know any easy way to deal with this, other than to advise domain experts to be even more vigilant than usual about assertions in this article, and not to gloss over statements that "feel" right, just because they are well-referenced by nearby reliable medical sources, especially (but not only) if those references are French. Mathglot (talk) 00:48, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Overall, this didn't look too bad to me in its current incarnation, except for the last paragraph. I know more than a bit about microbiology, and I am pretty sure I have gotten the gist of what the study cited in reference 11 was driving at. However, to be any more certain is going to take someone fluent, not in French, but in Mandarin, which I am sure is the original language of the paper.Toyokuni3 (talk) 05:55, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Dimensions

What are the dimensions of the protozoon? Prior to rev 691558202 the length was listed as "6-8 µm." The article currently says,

Of the three parasites in the genus Trichomonas, T. tenax is the smallest, measuring only 12-20 µm long and 5-6 µm wide...

The next sentence in the article says,

It may occasionally appear larger, allowing it to be confused with trichomonas vaginalis.

Given that t. vaginalis is 9×7 μm, this statement makes no sense, unless the previously stated length dimension for t. tenax is incorrect. Mathglot (talk) 21:37, 11 January 2018 (UTC)