Help:Extension:Translate/Quality assurance

Whether you a translator or translation admin, the Translate extension provides you the tools to produce higher quality (and more) translations. High quality can only be reached if everyone does their part. For the social aspect we encourage translations to take ask, don't guess attitude and translation admins should be responsive to questions.

Message documentation
The plain text is not enough for making good translations. This is gets more relevant the shorter the text is, but applies to all texts. Each message has a place to provide context and more info for translators. If you consider that it might take ten minutes to write good documentation for a message, but that documentation will save each of the potentially hundreds of translators a minute and produce higher quality translation, it should definitely be worth it.

It is possible to configure Ask question button show up in the translation editor. This provide low barrier and very direct way for translators to make sure they are doing a good translation, instead of doing best guess translation. Of course you should make sure that someone will be there to answer the questions and update message documentation, or you will only discourage translators.

The message documentation is wikitext and contain anything from links to images.

Translation review
The second important aspect of quality assurance is review. The review user right, which is given by default to translation reviewers user group enables users to accept translations they haven't made themselves. Multiple people can review the same message, and the software display the number of reviewers for each message.

Users can review messages for any message group or choose the Recent translations message group to review new translations as they come on. The accept buttons are shown in the accept translations and review all translations tasks. All reviews are logged to reduce and detect misuse. Message documentation is in important role here too, because the reviewer needs to be sure that the translations not only has the correct spelling and terminology, but that it also suitable for the context.

This can combined this with message group workflow states by having 'proofreading' state which can be used to direct the work done by reviewers.

Consistency
Translation memory can help a little to keep wordings of similar messages consistent. It cannot enforce consistent use of terms in different kinds of messages. For now there is no technical solution for this problem, but you can make glossaries and link them from the group description or use in message descriptions. When multiple translators work together is crucial that they first of all recognize the terms, and secondly that they use the same translations for them. When making glossaries, it is also a good idea to write short definition of each term instead of just providing translations. The definition helps translator to understand it and come up with good translations.