Steps to replicate the issue (include links if applicable):

From a *backup copy* of Meta-Wiki around but before 2022-11-26:

• Go to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2022/48
• Press Translate this page
• Attempt to translate to Cantonese (粵語)

I’m sorry I can’t describe any general way to replicate the issue. The issue is intermittent and I’m not seeing a pattern so I really don’t know how to replicate it. If you need live data I’ll check to see if the issue affects next week’s Tech News; but we only have 3 to 4 days to work on Tech News so if the issue cannot be replicated within that window I’ll have to proceed with the translation anyway.

What happens?:
Note that “suggestions” for “Recurrent item” and “Future changes” do not show the most up-to-date translations (i.e., the translation used in week 47 or 46). Sometimes suggestions will come up completely blank even though the exact same string had been translated the week before.

What should have happened instead?:
For those cases where a match should have been found but not, matches should have been “suggested”.

For those cases where outdated “suggestions” are shown, suggestions should not be weighted only by number of times used but also by date; recent translations should be given more weight. As it is, we can’t tell if any particular suggestion is old or new so we have to ignore all suggestions.

Implication: Because we can’t trust the suggestions list, we are forced to find a suitable translation by manually looking for one in a previous week, go to the translation screen for that page, then copy translations by hand. This completely defeats the whole purpose of the “suggestions” feature and in fact defeats the whole point of having a TM at all.

Software version (skip for WMF-hosted wikis like Wikipedia):

Other information (browser name/version, screenshots, etc.):
This might be specific to Meta-Wiki. I don’t have the background knowledge to tell if this is a general issue or an issue specific to Meta.