Hi everyone, I was the one who just rewrote the English version of the cuisine wiki page you are discussing so I’d like to share some of my thoughts on this. Most of this is about cuisine specifically but some of it probably applies to other pages too.
When I rewrote the page I deleted a lot of tags that were rarely used (a few even had zero uses globally) and removed a lot of outdated information. I also deleted a whole table in order to merge the old dessert and food tables. If someone is deleting that old information from the Spanish translation in order to match the recent changes on the English page that would be fantastic. Actually, in this case I would recommend completely rewriting the translations from scratch. Most of them are very out of date and it would be more work to merge changes than it would be to start over.
For the English page, I was aware that it would be used by people all over the world so I tried to take a global perspective as much as possible. Basically, I looked at global usage data to determine which items to include on the page, including only items above a certain threshold (about 100 global uses). There are definitely issues in the data driven approach, and there are definitely biases in the data, but I don’t think they are specific to the English language so I don’t think we need to consider them when thinking about translations.
I would expect that translations list the same items as the English page. It’s true that someone mapping in Spain probably doesn’t need to read through a list of foods commonly tagged in Japan. However, someone who speaks only Spanish who is trying to understand the global use of the cuisine tag would want those items in the list. I actually think it would be hard to remove items because of the way the templates work so this might be a moot point.
I think there is a lot more leeway in the translations of the descriptions of each item. My experience growing up in the United States definitely influenced what I wrote. Some of the foods are so obvious to me that they are hard to describe. Some I had never heard of. I tried to make the descriptions useful to anyone in the world who might not have heard of the foods before, but I have no way of knowing if they are any good or not. So if you are translating descriptions I would try just to make them useful to people who speak your language. That might mean just a one word translation of the name of the food, or it might mean a complete description of the food. Other information about spelling or cognates that is about the language is totally fine. The point is that it does not have to match the English description exactly, it just needs to be useful to speakers of your language.
I think the rest of the information on the page describing how to use the tag should be translated more closely. Also, the structure and sections of the page should definitely match so that future translators can more easily keep the translation up to date.
To summarize, I think that how to use the tag and what values to use are the same no matter where you are or what language you speak, so that information should be the same in the translation. But the descriptions and tips depend a lot on your language, culture, country, and personal experiences so that information should not have to match exactly.
