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Restarting a deleted translation that was once published always loads old translation
Open, Needs TriagePublic

Description

Suppose I did a translation and published. I continued translation some more. So that becomes a translation with 'draft' as status.
And later decided to delete it. As per the current implementation, the translation status changes to 'published' from 'draft' status.

Now if I change my mind and want to really resume my translation, I can do two things.

  1. Start a fresh translation for same translation languages and source title
  2. Or, from 'Published translations' tab in dashboard, 'continue translation'

In both of these cases, my old translation is restored. Which may make sense if my intention is to do some more additions to translations.

Some times, the source article may have changed significantly and you get a warning about it and old revision of source is loaded.And ask you to do a fresh translation if you wish. But that is not possible in this case.

To analyse:

  1. Whether the usecase of deleting and contining a 'once published' translaiton is common? If so what are the intentions of translator?
  2. Whether the translator prefer to have old translation restored or have fresh translation with latest version of source?
  3. If the translator want to start the translation from scratch, which is not possible right now, how do we want o give this feature?

Event Timeline

I think that the workflows that will generate less confusion are the following:

  • If the user accesses a translation through the in-progress or published translation listings, we asume the intent is to continue the existing work and provide a translation as the user saved it the last time.
  • If the user accesses a translation through the "new translation" dialog, we assume the user wants to start a new translation and provide a new empty translation with the latest version of the source article.
    • We may want to show a warning indicating that the user already started a translation for the current article and they can continue it, but even without such warning I don't expect much confusion.
  • For users trying to reach a translation through the URL we may want to allow continuing the work by default (if an existing translation exists) since they will have the option to start from scratch through the "new translation" button.