Wikipedia talk:Translating German Wikipedia

Return this page to what it was designed for

I propose that the section #Practical differences between German and English be deleted, as well as the non-typos in section Typos. The section #Auto-translation help should also be removed, possibly to be replaced by a link to WP:MACHINETRANSLATION. In addition, I would like to see some kind of hat note or intro sentence added at the top clearly stating that this a "tips" page aimed at German to English translators who could benefit from tips about the tasks involved in translating from German Wikipedia. That's what the page clearly was at the outset, and it should remain so.

When this page was first created by User:Wikid in 2008, it was a useful list of tips and tricks about process, formatting, Wikipedia-specific elements, and other things helpful to someone who knows how to translate from German, but may not be aware of the many issues concerning German Wikipedia. It very appropriately refrained from any attempting to portray itself as a course in German translation, something that normally would take several years of study at the university level.

Most of the article is still about process, but over time the original focus of the page has been muddied by addition of instruction in elementary issues of German, such as False friends info. Though I'm sure with all the best intentions, adding basic info about German is not helpful to this article; it may make the naive editor with a course in German I or no knowledge of the language at all believe that with an automatic translator in hand plus the seven bullet points in the Practical differences section of the article they can translate from German Wikipedia. As anyone familiar with translation knows, nothing could be further from the truth, and we'll just end up with more poor articles to be deleted. Mathglot (talk) 07:49, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

I've tightened up the page a bit, removing one off-topic section, and shortening and cleaning up the lead.

I think the section on "Auto-translation help" should be removed, because by listing what things to look out for when using automatic translation, it's creating two problems: 1. indicating that it's okay to use automatic translation when it's not okay, and 2. getting into "how to translate German" questions again, rather than the issue of how to translate from German Wikipedia, which is a different (and much shorter) topic. This section currently has seven bullet points, and having looked at them, I don't see any which are relevant here. The section should be removed. Mathglot (talk) 23:53, 6 January 2018 (UTC)