[translations] Managing a translation team and translation workflow

[Jose A. Reyero]

Hi All,

Since it seems there are no common guidelines to manage a translation 
team and handle the translation workflow, I'd like to propose some to be 
discused and maybe posted as documentation. Still I think it is great 
that every translation team can have their own policy and override this 
workflow, so this would be just some recomendation.

Also it would be great if we could share experiences across translation 
teams in order to improve the translation workflow. This is based on the 
organization in place for the Spanish team which is a big one (1000+ 
members). I'd like to hear whether other groups have similar or 
different set ups and whether they are working well for them.

The current set up:
==============
1. Administrators (all roles). Currently 10 people.
This is granted upon request to people asking for it for some reason, 
like running a translation sprint somewhere or being in charge of some 
team doing translations. They can grant the moderator role to anyone, 
upload po's or fix any string, etc...
Still, they are asked to generally submit po's a suggestions for 
moderation and not abusing self-moderation in general. The idea is the 
administrator role is intended to help others translate, but not to 
speed up your own translations.

2. Moderators (translation community moderator role). Difficult to count 
but there may be around 50 people.
This is granted upon request to anyone asking for it.
Note moderator role doesn't include self moderation.

3. Translators (only translation team member role).
This is for every group member, membership is 'Open' for this team. They 
can submit translations but not moderating them.

Current status
=========
- Translations come in steady, we have some of the highest % of 
translated strings
- We have a huge bottleneck with moderation which causes some 
frustrations. Considering granting moderator role to everybody.
- We've had some misunderstandings with auto-moderation. Considering 
taking auto-moderation from everyone (admins).
- Missing a handbook page with this policy clearly stated (my fault), 
which may have caused some of the misunderstandings.

So, I'd like to hear from other teams to learn better ideas and improve 
our workflow. Along with your experience it would be useful to have the 
approximate number of team members / administrators, etc, to decide on 
whether a given set up may be useful for small or big teams.

Thanks,

Jose