User talk:Tandarts

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[edit] Batch Automated Translations

I've run some Batch Automated Translations on your "Biographies of Saint Lucian politicians". Good Luck with it, hopefully it helps. --Tandarts 03:25, 13 July 2005 (UTC) [[1]]

I see that you are new at least to the English-language Wikipedia, and I'm sure this was well intentioned, but as it says quite clearly at Wikipedia:Translation into English: "Never use machine translation to create an article!" Unless you plan to clean these up yourself, they should be deleted. Do you plan to clean them up? Or should I list them all on VfD? In any case, please don't do this again, especially not on a bunch of articles at once, because even if you are planning to follow through yourself, it's a lot better to do one at a time, so that it doesn't leave a significant number of junk articles lying around until you get to them. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:50, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

I don't see them as junk articles because they are still in the translation proces. With the advantage that anyone with just a slight knowledge of (in this case Spanish) can finish their translation. If not, they automatically move to the translation archive. Besides, there was a request for their translation from you, I'd guess that half a translation is allways better than none at all. If you look through the translation list there are enough other partially translated documents. Why is this any different? Because it's automated? Consider yourself lucky that I didnt translate it myself... I don't know what the result would have been.

And if someone else wants to translate it his own way, let him delete it and start over again. I won't be offended. --Tandarts 15:12, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Again, the English-language Wikipedia has a strong policy against auto-translated articles. If we didn't, we'd get a slew of badly written articles. This has been discussed before, and there was a pretty strong consensus around it.

I can read Spanish just fine, and even if I couldn't, I could as easily run them through auto-translation myself and get exactly as much as I get out of these pasted-in autotranslated articles. If I remember correctly, my request originated because someone on the Spanish-language Wikipedia pointed out that there were no corresponding articles in English, but didn't even know enough English to make the translation request himself. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:21, July 14, 2005 (UTC)

Hi Tandarts, I just cleaned up Boswell Williams as much as I could without being able to speak Spanish. Looking at the standard of your English, I'd say you could do a much, much better job than the machine :-) and could definitely translate things like Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom instead of leaving it as Isabel II of the United Kingdom, or change "he/it" into "he" if the article is about a man. Why don't you have a go? As it is, they'll just get deleted, and you'll have wasted all that valuable time and effort you spent putting them through the machine. Saintswithin 07:26, July 14, 2005 (UTC)