I tried to eat our own dogfood this AM. Below is an account of what I found.

What I tried to do was to create a translation of my page Alain Désilets on the site, into French and Spanish

Snag #1

The page Alain Désilets did not have a language assigned to it at the start.

I clicked on Translate button, and saw a pick list of languages. I selected French, thinking that this would specify the language of the translation.

Unfortunately, this was a case where the source page did not have a language associated with it, and this picklist was for specifying the language of the source page. So I ended up with a source page in French.

Now, as it turns out, there was a message above the language picklist that said:

"No language is assigned to this page. Please select a language before performing translation."

But it was in a microscopic font. And since I was in a translation mode, as soon as I saw the language picklist, I assumed it was for specifying the target language. In order to counter that assumption (which I think many users will have), we need to display a much more prominent WARNING: style_ message.

Another thing that could be done to minimize occurences of these kinds of cases, would be to do a better job at guessing the language of a newly created page.

For example, if I just created the present page using a dangling link on page Cross Lingual Wiki Engine Project, which is in English. In a case like that, I think it's safe to assume that the page is in English.