The red (or gray) interlanguage links are supposed to invite people to translate an article that they are currently reading. Our current statistics show that they are not as efficient as we would expect, and most people come to CX through other entry points.
There may be several reasons for this:
- We haven't yet deployed CX in the English Wikipedia, which is the #1 source language already now, and people don't see these interlanguage links there.
- The general discoverability of the interlanguage links list is sub-optimal.
- People don't necessarily have the target language in their cookies or in their browser.
- We haven't enabled geolocation yet.
Beyond these possible reasons, it's possible that the red/gray interlanguage link is just not the best entry point, and the association with the red links in articles just doesn't work as we thought it would.
It nevertheless makes sense to me that it's worth exploring an entry point that will appear in the source article - maybe in the interlanguage links area but not as a language name; maybe near the "Edit" button at the top; maybe at some other place, possibly more than one (there's more than one edit button, for example - and even the efficiency of that is not very well measured).