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 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
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 displays 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.

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.

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 ...