The Bharatpedia Translation Project coordinates the translation of high-quality articles, policies, help pages, and educational content across different languages. Translating articles helps bridge knowledge gaps, expands access to open knowledge, and ensures content is accessible to multi-lingual communities.
Overview and Goals
Bharatpedia encourages multi-lingual editors to translate well-sourced, high-quality content from other language editions (such as English, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Sanskrit, Marathi, and Santali) into Bharatpedia, and vice versa.
Primary Objectives
- Content Expansion: Bring vital encyclopedic topics, regional history, and technical guides to a wider audience.
- Standardization: Translate core policy pages, system templates, and editing tutorials into local languages.
- Quality Control: Ensure translated content meets strict standards of verifiability, neutrality, and readability.
Translation Workflow
Translating an article involves more than simple word-for-word substitution. Follow these steps to produce high-quality translated pages:
1. Selecting an Article
- Choose articles tagged as Featured or Good Quality on other language platforms.
- Prioritize topics that are missing or underdeveloped on Bharatpedia.
- Ensure the source content has reliable inline citations.
2. Drafting the Translation
- Work in your personal Sandbox or create a draft page (e.g.,
Draft:Article Name) before publishing directly to the mainspace. - Use natural phrasing rather than machine translation output. Always proofread for accurate terminology, grammar, and tone.
- Adapt localized units, date formats, and regional naming conventions where appropriate.
3. Proper Attribution (Copyright Compliance)
Under open-content licenses (CC BY-SA 4.0), you **must** give copyright attribution to the original authors when translating from another wiki or encyclopedia edition.
How to Provide Attribution:
1. Edit Summary: Always state the source in your publishing edit summary (e.g., "Translated content from [source page title] on [source wiki]"). 2. Talk Page Banner: Place a translation attribution notice on the talk page of the newly translated article.
4. Formatting and Localizing Wikicode
- Replace foreign template names with local Bharatpedia equivalents (e.g., Infoboxes and maintenance tags).
- Fix or update internal wikilinks to point to existing Bharatpedia articles.
- Ensure all reference tags (
<ref>...</ref>) are retained and properly formatted.
Machine Translation Policy
While machine translation tools (such as Google Translate, DeepL, or MediaWiki Content Translation) can speed up drafting, **raw, unedited machine translation is strictly prohibited**.
- Do Not Copy-Paste Raw Machine Output: Unedited machine translations often contain severe grammatical errors, incorrect technical terminology, and awkward sentence structures.
- Review and Edit: Machine output must be thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and polished by a fluent speaker before publishing.
- Substandard Content: Pages that consist entirely of unedited, low-quality machine translations may be tagged for cleanup or nominated for deletion.
Requesting a Translation
If you find an important topic that needs translation but cannot translate it yourself, you can list it in the request table below or post on the discussion page:
Translation Requests
| Article Title | Source Language | Target Language | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ancient Indian Inscriptions | English | Hindi | In Progress |
| Indian Cartography | English | Bengali | Requested |