The Automatic translation card supports Machine Translation service selection for both the current paragraph and the default selection for the document. Since the selected approach was applied immediately to the current paragraph, that distinction became a bit blurry. In addition, there was not a clear policy on how to deal with user modifications that where lost at any change (T106427).
In this ticket a simpler model is proposed based on te following principles:
- Changes affect the current paragraph by default. When selecting a different translation service or strategy only the current paragraph is affected. A "Keep as default" action is shown when a non-default option is applied to allow making this the default from the next paragraphs.
- User modifications are preserved unless the user explicitly discards them. If I get a translation from Apertium, and I modify the content. After switching to Matxin and back to Apertium, I should get the version of the content I modified. There will be an option to reset the translation but that is not the default behaviour.
As illustrated above the changes with respect the current model are:
- No actions are provided directly in the card for "Use source text", "Clear paragraph" or "Restore".
- The selected options are only kept as default explicitly (using the "Keep as default option which is only shown when a non-default option is selected).
- When users modify content, the modifications are ket associated with the current translation service. If the service is selected again, those changes are preserved.
- When there are user modifications, a "Reset translation" option is provided in the selector. The option is provided on top and separated from the translation service selection options.
Measurements
We may want to get a better idea n how the current card is used before applying these changes. It would be good to know:
- How much are the current direct actions ("Use source text", "Clear paragraph" or "Restore") used, since those will be moved behind the selector.
- How often people change the default translation services. The proposed design assumes a pattern of a stable default service and occasional changes when that does not work well for a specific paragraph. We may want to get some stability on the translation services available as default (T86700) before measuring this.