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 administrator, 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
The number of reviewers who have accepted a translation is shown near the message name, in proofreading tasks. "Only messages I can review" task is displayed only to reviewers).

Of more interest, translators see in their watchlist when any of their translation has been accepted. 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
Translation review is performed 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 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". In review all translations task "accept" button is greyed out when you cannot review a message.

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
The "recent translations" group with "accept translations" task is perhaps the most useful translation review feature. It basically supersedes Special:RecentChanges for most uses. It is linked from Special:LanguageStats.

In this page you can immediately see all translations you can review and only them. Most of the needed information is there and rest is shown when you open the translation editor.

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 you spend more time doing the mere proofreading and more improving messages and giving feedback to other translators.

The initial review of message group is better done one group at a time rather than in chronological order. The next section provides you a divide and conquer solution to decrease the review backlog.

Systematic review
Translation review makes the hard job of proofreading a whole message group to keep them at an high level of quality and consistency into a real joy.

If you know a message group well and want to keep its translations at high quality, you can open it with "review all translations" task and go through it all at once. Now you can check that messages have been correctly interpreted and improve their documentation; 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 information, you only have to click and use the translation editor to resolve it.

The next time, you'll only have to open the group again and immediately see new translations which need review, i.e. those with "Accept" button enabled; you won't need to follow closely recent changes nor to watchlist all messages, which are respectively too crowded and not practical. The list can be a bit long with all the old and reviewed translations shown along with the new ones, so 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. In such cases more than usual, different translators might translate the messages, using different terms and resulting in a confusing translation. Moreover, if consistency is improved the suggestions given by translation memory are more consistent and this should improve consistency among all message groups.

Workflows
Translate extension is designed for publishing translations 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 can use a more formal process. You can implement a workflow through message group states.

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

Reviewing of translation can be combined with message group workflow states by having a proofreading state which can be used to direct the work done by proofreaders. As explained in more detail in the relevant page the two features do not interact with each other: they are controlled separately by the users.