Help:Extension:Translate/Quality assurance

High quality can only be reached when everyone does their part: we've summarised some ../Translation best practices/ which should be followed. Whether you are a translator or a translation admin, the Translate extension provides you the tools to produce higher quality translations. The Statistics and reporting page explains the many tools which allow translators to find where work is needed and translation administrators to monitor the ongoing work and the quantity of translations; in this page we describe the quality assurance technical tools that encourage translators to work together and constantly improve their translations and allow to have a basic measurement of the translations' quality, the main of which are the translation review features.

Translation review features
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 accept the same message. All reviews are logged to reduce and detect abuse.

Message documentation plays an important role here as well, because the reviewer needs to be sure that the translations not only has the correct spelling and terminology, but also that it is suitable for the context.

For translators
[Screenshot of "review all" for normal user.]

The number of reviewers who have accepted a translation are shown near the message name, but only in "review all translations" and "accept translations" tasks.

Of more interest, translators are shown in their watchlist the fact that a translation of theirs (or of any other message they follow) has been accepted. This is useful because they can see that someone is looking at (and appreciating) their work and they're not left alone (or ignored), so they can be more confident about translating.

It's (currently) not possible to exclude translation review log entries from the watchlist, watchlist email notifications or recent changes.

For reviewers
[Screenshot of "accept translations" task for reviewer in recent translations group]

Translation review is performed from Special:Translate: the "accept" buttons are useful in the "accept translations" and "review all translations" tasks (the former being displayed only to reviewers) but are shown also in "view all messages" [Really?]. Reviewers can review messages for any message group or choose the Recent translations message group to review new translations as they become available.

Translations made by yourself don't show up at all in "accept translations" task. The list of messages in that task is therefore different for each reviewer. Your own translations are listed along with all the others in "review all translations", but "accept" is button greyed out.

For other reviewers
Other reviewers benefit from knowing that some messages have already been accepted (and by how many users) because they can choose to focus review efforts on unreviewed messages in the group, which might also have been left unaccepted by an unsure reviewer (there's still no way to report a doubtful translation); and, if they're unsure about a translation but one or more other reviewers accepted it, this can give them some guidance.

Reviewing recent translations
[Screenshot of translation editor in this task]

The "recent translations" group with "accept translations" task is perhaps the most useful and pleasurable translation review feature. It basically supersedes Special:RecentChanges for most uses (if you want to look at translations), and as such is linked from Special:LanguageStats.

In this page you can immediately see all translations you can review: all the needed information is there and you don't need to click around just to see the translation and its definition.

It's very fast to mark translations as accepted. When you find a translation you're unsure about, in this view (and only here) you have an additional tool. If you click the message name to bring up the translation editor, there you will see the name of last author, edit summary and the changes in the last edit are highlighted. Now you can either close the popup and mark the translation as accepted or you can immediately correct the translation. You've saved a lot of time with this feature, so if you make a correction please spend some seconds to enter an edit summary, a simple feature often neglected by translators which will help the original translator understand your correction and improve future translations.

If you try this feature, you'll notice that it will take you way less time to check the recent changes, you'll improve more messages, give more feedback to other translators and be more satisfied.

If you want to review many messages or even all messages in a project or wiki, it's not wise to face them in chronological order, the backlog will overcome you. But the next section provides you a divide et impera solution to conquer the perfect translation target.

Systematic review
Translation review, at last, makes the hard job of keeping the translation of a whole message group at high quality and consistency a real joy.

If you know a message group well and/or want to keep its translations good, you can open it with "review all translations" task and see it all at once. Now you can go through it, check that messages have been correctly interpreted (and improve their documentation if they were not), ensure that source terms have been translated in the same way everywhere (easier because you have both source and translate text of each message). If a translation is ok you only need a click to accept it and you're already on the next; if it isn't or you need more info, you only have to click and use the advanced editor to resolve it.

The next time, you'll only have to open the group again and immediately see new translations which need review, not needing to follow recent changes closely (they're too crowded) nor to watchlist all messages (it's not practical). If you now know the group well and you don't know to have old translations at hand, you can jst choose "accept translations" and see only the new ones.

Translation memory can help a little to keep the wording of similar messages consistent. It cannot enforce consistent use of terms in different kinds of messages. There is no technical solution for this problem yet, but you now have a handy tool to imrpoe consistency piece by piece. It's a good achievement to have consistent translations at least across a whole message group, especially if it uses special terms that are hard to understand if not translated consistently after being confusing for the translator that doesn't remember them (especially if part of the group has been translated by someone else). Moreover, if consistency is improved in a part of the wiki the translation memory will give better suggestions everywhere and the effects will be vaster.

Worflows
[Screenshot of a message group state with review buttons]

If you want to be sure that translations are of good quality before using them, you may want to use a more formal process than the usual one the Translate extension is mostly designed for (publishing translations immediately or as soon as possible to show translators the impact of their work). Such a process, that we call a workflow, is applied in the Translation extension through message group states, if you need it.

The translation review does not, in itself, have any actual effect on the appearance or usage of translations, so it's a quite different tool than the Flagged revisions extension: its scope is not to find and provide to its readers the best translation among those available, but to encourage quality work on translations.

The translation review, however, can be combined with message group workflow states by having the 'proofreading' state which can be used to direct the work done by reviewers. As explained in more detail in the relevant page, there is currently no software interaction between the two features.