In other words this is an edge case, exception to bug 35946 (which introduced the "Translate" tab).

What about a regular "Edit" link pointing to the equivalent source page?

Users might end up in /en pages without noticing, and seeing a "View source" link might confuse them.

"View source" is the regular label of the regular edit link when you can't actually edit.

Sure, but the fact is that users can edit the English text they are seeing. Only not in that /en page but in the source page that has exactly the same content.

We can try to explain to potential editors the weirdness of the "English translation of the English source text" so they understand where they need to go, or we can simply provide them a shortcut labeled "Edit" to get them started.

Change 213330 had a related patch set uploaded (by Nemo bis):
On /en subpages don't force the action=edit tab to "translate"

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/213330

What ever the solution to this may be, I recommend to add a link to "create/edit in <users language>" in some prominent place, since (1) that is what users often want to do (2) no such link is on the /en page if a translation to the users language does not yet exist.

Btw. I for one most often get to the /en pages following links in /qqq or talk pages or twn support, and at about 90% of the times, while I am at them, also want to create translations for them.

I also recommend to refer to "source language pages" instead of /en pages even if /en pages currently are the only source language pages on twn. We can expect that to change on the long run. ;-)

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Do note that the tab says "edit" because we are using the "expensive" version of the hooks which determine whether the page is ediable, which are not run for the tab.

Change 213330 merged by jenkins-bot:
On /en subpages don't force the action=edit tab to "translate"

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/213330