translate

name	translate
description	Translate the manuscript between Turkish and English — section by section, with the terminology fixed in advance and a deterministic check that the citations, the quantities and the cross-references survived. Produces the target-language draft beside the source one, never on top of it. Use when a Turkish thesis becomes an English submission, when an English draft becomes a Turkish thesis chapter, or when a journal's language differs from the one the work was written in.
disable-model-invocation	true
argument-hint	[tr-en|en-tr] [<section file or 'all'>]

/translate — The Same Paper in the Other Language

What this command is, and is not

It is a translation with the invariants enforced: the same sources cited, the same quantities reported, the same figure pointed at, the same term used for the same concept throughout. Those four are what a reader of only the target text cannot check and what translation_check.py checks mechanically.

It is not a machine-translation button. The translation happens here, one section at a time, because the failure mode of a whole-document pass is a paragraph quietly dropped — and a dropped paragraph that carried no citation, no number and no cross-reference is invisible to every check in this kit. The length ratio in the report exists for exactly that gap.

Gate: Abort if Failed

1. Check: at least one section file exists under drafts/.
2. Check: PROJECT.md states the output language. If the translation target is the new output language, update PROJECT.md after the translation is accepted — not before, or every subsequent check will judge the source draft against the wrong language's conventions.
3. Decide where it lands: drafts/en/ for tr→en, drafts/tr/ for en→tr. The source is never overwritten. Two languages of one paper are two documents, and the moment one replaces the other, the ability to check them against each other is gone.

Procedure

Step 1: Fix the terminology before translating a word

Read the project's own glossary (templates/tr-terminology.json, copied in by /new-project), and build the term table for this paper: every domain term that appears more than twice, with the single rendering it will have in the target language.

Present it to the author before starting. Two reasons this comes first:

• a term decided mid-translation means the first half and the second half of the paper use different words for one concept, and that reads as two authors;
• Turkish academic vocabulary is genuinely contested (veri seti / veri kümesi, öznitelik / özellik, duyarlılık / anma). The kit does not pick — the author does, once, here. tr_style_check.py and translation_check.py then both enforce the choice rather than a preference.

Terms with no accepted Turkish equivalent stay in English, italicised, with the Turkish gloss at first mention — and then consistently in that form.

Step 2: Translate one section, in this session

Drafting is never delegated, and translation is drafting. Per section, in the target language's academic register (academic-writing skill: turkish-academic.md or english-academic.md):

Carry across unchanged:

• every citation key, byte for byte — [@yilmaz2020derin] is not translated;
• every quantity, at the precision the source reports it. Re-rounding is not a translation decision; if 0,8091 should be 0.81, it should be 0.81 in both versions, and that is an edit to make in both;
• evidence card ids (EV-####), equation numbers, and the identity of every figure and table (Şekil 3 ↔ Figure 3 — the number never moves).

Change deliberately:

• the decimal separator, to the target language's convention (0,85 ↔ 0.85) and the thousands separator with it;
• the cross-reference word (Tablo ↔ Table), never its number;
• figure captions and axis labels — regenerate them rather than editing the image: python scripts/results_figure.py --lang en … writes the caption in the target language from the same register.

Never do:

• translate the title of a cited work inside the bibliography. A Turkish source keeps its Turkish title; the target style's rule for a bracketed translation is the citation-styles skill's, and references.bib is written by doi2bib.py alone in any case;
• translate a direct quotation without marking it. A translated quotation is a paraphrase of a translation: mark it ([çeviri bize aittir] / [author's translation]) or quote the original and translate in a footnote;
• carry a hedge across at a different strength. may contribute is not katkı sağlamaktadır. The claim-strength ladder is language-independent and claim_check.py reads the target text, not the source.

Step 3: Check what must not have changed

python scripts/translation_check.py --source drafts/03-yontem.md \
    --target drafts/en/03-methods.md --source-lang tr --target-lang en

Findings, and what each one actually means:

Finding	Read it as
citation_lost	a paragraph was dropped, or a citation was silently merged
citation_added	a source appeared in translation — find out where from
number_missing / number_added	a digit moved, or a sentence was reformulated away from its number
number_rounded	legitimate, but now the two versions report different digits — fix one
crossref_mismatch	figure/table numbering shifted between versions
term_unity	one concept, two renderings in the target — Step 1's table was not applied
untranslated_lines	a passage was pasted, not translated
section_count	a heading was lost or added

Resolve every finding before moving to the next section. A backlog of findings across ten sections is how a translation ends up with a bibliography that does not match its text.

Then the shape line: a length ratio far from ~1.0–1.3 (tr→en usually shortens slightly; en→tr usually lengthens) is the only signal the kit has for a dropped paragraph that carried nothing checkable. Look at it.

Step 4: Register, then the language's own conventions

• style-auditor on the target text — register, hedging balance, tense discipline in the target language, not the source's.
• Turkish target: python scripts/tr_style_check.py — term unity, voice mixing, and the Özet↔Abstract equivalence.
• Thesis: /front-matter --check — Özet and Abstract must carry the same number of keywords, and the same claims. A translated abstract that gained a sentence is the single most common finding at the institute's formal check.

Step 5: What the translation does not inherit

State these plainly when handing back:

• verify-status.json refers to the draft it was run on. Re-run /verify-citations against the translated draft — the citation keys should be identical, which makes this cheap, and if it is not cheap something moved.
• Review rounds (reviews/round-N.md) refer to the source draft's line numbers.
• word_budget.py targets are language-specific; an English 8.000-word limit is not a Turkish 8.000-word limit.

Report

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🌐 Çeviri tamamlandı — tr → en · 03-yontem
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Hedef:     drafts/en/03-methods.md · 1.180 kelime (kaynak 1.040 · oran 1.13)
Değişmezler: atıf 14/14 ✓ · nicelik 22/22 ✓ · çapraz gönderme 6/6 ✓
Terim tablosu: 11 terim sabitlendi · karışım yok ✓
Kalan bulgu: yok

Sonraki bölüm: 04-bulgular  ·  Bitince: /verify-citations (çeviri taslağına karşı)

Never report a section as translated while translation_check.py still returns findings, and never report the invariants as "✓" from reading the text — that line comes from the script or it does not appear.

Notes

• Özet is not a translation of the Abstract, and vice versa — but they must make the same claims and carry the same keyword count. Write the second one from the first, then check with /front-matter --check, not by eye.
• Both languages, kept in sync, is a maintenance cost the author is taking on knowingly: every later revision has to be made twice, and translation_check.py is the only thing that will notice when it was made once. Say this out loud at the start, not at the end.
• A translated manuscript is still the author's work and the AI-use disclosure should say translation assistance explicitly — /disclosures ai has the field.

Reference

• Scripts: python scripts/translation_check.py (--source, --target, --source-lang, --target-lang, --glossary) · python scripts/tr_style_check.py · python scripts/results_figure.py --lang · python scripts/word_budget.py
• Subagent: style-auditor (register in the target language; returns an edit list, never a rewrite)
• Skills: academic-writing (turkish-academic.md, english-academic.md), citation-styles (how a translated title is cited), thesis-structure (Özet↔Abstract)
• Writes: drafts/<lang>/<section>.md
• Related: /import-manuscript (bring the other language's draft in first), /retarget (a venue change is what usually triggers this), /front-matter

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Two honest translations of one paragraph share no sentence. They share every citation, every number, and every figure they point at — which is why those are the ones a machine checks.