Help:Extension:Translate/Quality assurance

High quality can only be reached when everyone does their part: we have summarised some translation best practices that should be followed. Whether you are a translator or a translation admin, the Translate extension provides you the tools to produce higher quality translations. In statistics and reporting we have described the many tools which allow translators to find where their effort is needed and translation administrators to monitor the progress. In this page we explain the quality assurance technical tools that encourage translators to work together to improve their translations. Translation proofreading is a very important task and the provided tools make it possible to increase and assess the quality of translations.

Translation review features
The access to the review tools is controlled by user right. Translate extension by default adds an user group called translation reviewers. In proofreading tasks the reviewers can indicate that they think the translation is correct and good by clicking a button. The reviews are tracked, so reviewers don't need to review messages they have already reviewed again. Reviewers can only accept translations they haven't made themselves. Multiple people can accept the same translations. Reviews are logged to reduce and detect abuse.

Message documentation plays an important role here as well. Reviewer needs to be sure that not only the translation 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 is shown near the message name, in "review all translations" and "accept translations" tasks (the first group is displayed only to reviewers).

Of more interest, translators are shown in their watchlist the fact that a translation of theirs has been accepted; the same with any other message they follow. This is useful because they can see that someone is looking at their work and appreciating it, and that 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 [only?] on Special:Translate: the "accept" buttons are shown in the "accept translations" and "review all translations" tasks. 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" button is greyed out.

For other reviewers
Other reviewers benefit from knowing that some messages have already been accepted, and by how many users. In fact, they can choose to focus review efforts on unreviewed translations in the group. Such translations might also have been left unaccepted by an unsure reviewer and require more attention: there's still no way to report an uncertain translation. Also, 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. As such is linked from Special:LanguageStats. If you select the group from the dropdown, it's the last of the list.

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 changes in the last edit highlighted, the name of its author and its edit summary. 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 which will help the original translator understand your correction and improve future translations.

When you try this feature, you'll notice that it takes you way less time to check the recent changes, you improve more messages, give more feedback to other translators and are 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 into 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, which is easier because you have both source and translated 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 closely recent changes nor to watchlist all messages, which are respectively too crowded and not practical. If you now know the group well and you don't know to have old translations at hand, you can just 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 impose 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: which are hard to understand if not translated consistently; and confusing for the translator that doesn't remember them maybe because 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.

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

By default the Translate extension is designed for publishing translations immediately or as soon as possible to show translators the impact of their work. If you want to be sure that translations are of good quality before using them, you may want to use a more formal process. 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.