Help:Content translation/Translating/Translation quality

When creating a translation, reviewing the contents is essential. You need to make sure that the content produced is not altering the original meaning, and check that it reads natural in the destination language. The initial machine translation provided helps to speed the translation process by providing a useful starting point, but the tool requires users to review and edit further the initial contents.

Different mechanisms are available to enforce translators to edit the initial translations appropriately. The translation editor tracks how much the initial translation is modified by the user, and defines different limits to either prevent publishing, or warn users to encourage them to further review the contents.

In this way the tool makes it possible to take advantage of machine translation, while preventing users to create lightly reviewed translations. More detail about how these limits work, how they can adjusted to the needs of each language, and how to measure the quality of the content produced with the tool is provided below.

Limits to encourage reviewing the translation
Content translation measures the percentage of modifications that users make on the initial automatic translation (a) for each paragraph and (b) for the whole translation.

Limits for the whole translation. To prevent vandalism the tool prevents to publish content with 99% or more of unmodified contents for the whole document. This was intended to block the most clear vandalism (i.e., people just adding paragraphs to the translation and publishing them with no edit at all).

Limits for each paragraph. For each paragraph with more than 80% of unmodified machine translation, a warning is shown to the user to encourage editing further the contents. This does not prevent publishing, If the user publishes the content, the resulting page is added to a tracking category of potentially unreviewed translations for the community to review.

Adjusting the limits
Each language is different.

Tracking potentially unreviewed translations
A tracking category is provided for the community to easily find the articles that were published with some content exceeding the recommended limits.

Measuring the quality
Evaluate content quality automatically is not trivial.

Limits based on user expertise
Some wikis have implemented limits based on the user rights.