Help:Extension:Translate/Quality assurance

Whether you are a translator or a translation admin, the Translate extension provides you the tools to produce higher quality (and more) translations. High quality can only be reached when everyone does their part. For the social aspect we encourage translations to take the 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 more relevant in shorter texts, but it applies to all texts. Each message has a place to provide context and more info for translators. 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 or more and produce higher quality translation, so it's definitely worth it.

It is possible to configure Ask question button show up in the translation editor. This provides a low barrier and very direct way for translators to make sure they are doing a good translation, instead of doing a best guess translation. Of course you should make sure that someone will be there to answer the questions and update the 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 become available. The accept buttons are shown in the "accept translations" and "review all translations" tasks. 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.

This can be combined with message group workflow states by having the '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, it is crucial that they first of all recognize the terms, and secondly that they use the same translations. When making glossaries, it is also a good idea to write short definition for each term instead of just providing translations. The definition helps translators to understand them and apply them in their translations.