... To add to the original description, I repeatedly miss this button as I see an article that I want to translate, but not the language to which I want to translate. For whatever reason, it's possible that the potential translator doesn't have the desired target language in the cookies or the preferences. Having the gray interlanguage link as the only possible direct entry point from the source article is suboptimal.

I think the usecase is totally valid, but the solution may not be add yet another persistent call to action. Here are some ways we can support this usecase:

• Provide options to switch language from the creation panel As illustrated in the early designs, the idea was to allow users to select a different language to translate to (or from). That would allow users to inspect in which other languages the article is available (e.g., highlighting whether it is featured there) and which other languages the article is missing in. For the specific language selection controls we may want to update the former designs to be more aligned with the from/to selectors in other parts of the UI:

• Make the contributions entry point more contextual. Users already have a persistent entry point they are often using to start translations (i.e., hovering the "contributions" link and clicking on "translations". We may want to make the "translation" option of that menu to also suggest you to translate the current page displayed (something similar to T88600). In this case the user viewing the article X can decide to either (a) visit the list of all translations or (b) go to the dashboard with the new translation dialog prefilled with article X and source language, ready to select which language to translate to.
• Include current page in the suggestions list. When the user reaches the translation dashboard from an article using the popover menu, that article can be included as the top suggestion (if it is missing in the user language) in order to anticipate a potential next logical step.
• Extend the functionality of existing interlanguage link edition Interlanguage links already have an "edit links" action which currently is intended to connect existing pages across languages through Wikidata. For a user it may be reasonable to be able to create new translations from there (editing the list of language versions to add a new one). While presenting a top-level action to create a new translation can present a confusing choice, we can use the edit links as an entry point to allow users to either (a) link existing articles and (b) create new ones.

red (or gray) interlanguage links

Are they all grey now? Do you have numbers on whether the red links (on monobook) were clicked more than the grey links (in monobook itself after recent changes, or in Vector)?

In T100344#1451580, @Pginer-WMF wrote:

I think the usecase is totally valid, but the solution may not be add yet another persistent call to action. Here are some ways we can support this usecase:

• Provide options to switch language from the creation panel As illustrated in the early designs, the idea was to allow users to select a different language to translate to (or from). That would allow users to inspect in which other languages the article is available (e.g., highlighting whether it is featured there) and which other languages the article is missing in. For the specific language selection controls we may want to update the former designs to be more aligned with the from/to selectors in other parts of the UI:

First way of different ways to support described use case is implemented and exists in "New translation" dialog and dialog when Suggestions item is clicked (which share same dialog, but are two different ways to get to it).
@Pginer-WMF, does that resolve this ticket?

This task is not about the dashboard. It's about what is seen at the article. I changed the title in an attempt to clarify this.

The point is to make translating the article that I'm currently reading as available as possible.

Currently it may be available if one of the gray links happens to be the language into which I want to translate. This is not always the case. It happened to be many times that I wanted to translate a particular article, and the language that I needed was not in the gray links list, so I had to go to Special:CX in some other way, and type the article name into the page selector. This is not optimal.

How will this actually look like is a question for designers:

• Maybe it will be a "translate this article" button
• Maybe it will be a change in the interlanguage links design that will allow selecting any language and not just the 3 that are automatically selected now (I'm writing another task about this now, but I need to gather a bit of data before I publish it)
• Maybe something else

But the scenario is: As a Wikipedia reader, I want to start translating the article that I'm reading to any language that I want, with as little typing and clicking as possible. (And without bothering people who aren't interested in translation too much.)

This may seem like a bit of a corner-case, rare scenario, but in fact I see this as one of the most important strategic scenarios for growth in the number of articles and editors across languages. The fact that we haven't implemented such a thing well till now doesn't mean that it's doomed to fail.