[translations] Managing a translation team and translation workflow

Sun Oct 23 17:03:12 UTC 2011

The Dutch translation team has 412 members of which 211 contributors, 2 community managers and self moderator, 23 community moderators. 
26777 translated strings, 1052 awaiting approval.

Anyone can join the Dutch team, the Community moderator role is assigned to people who have shown to be good translators. We give preference to quality over quantity. We maintain a style guide and word list as wiki pages and have a page about the procedure of contributing translations. Despite these instruction efforts the vast majority of the beginning translators make the same kind of mistakes. Feedback to translators is how we try to improve the quality of individual translators, but it is a time consuming effort.

Translations sprints seem to be an effective way to activate translators. Translations come in as a steady stream but approval is a bottleneck. Last week we held our first "translation approval sprint". It was very effective! Approximately 2800 waiting string were processed by 6 people during a one day sprint.

Erik Stielstra

On 9 okt 2011, at 13:38, Hilde Austlid wrote:

> Hi!
> It's a good idea to share experiences on this, and learn from each other.
> 
> Norwegian Bokmål (http://localize.drupal.org/translate/languages/nb) is a small language, and the translation team is small. We've decided that we can't afford to have two people looking at every string, so to some extent we've sacrificed quality for quantity.
> 
> Administrators: 4.
> Seems to be enough, when people ask for extended priviledges they rarely have to wait more than a day or two, at most. (Only two of us are actively handling those requests, so we're a bit vulnerable, though. We'll need to be alert and ready to add more admins if needed.)
> 
> Self moderation + community moderation: ~25 people.
> To get these permissions (both of them) you need to post a comment in our welcome-thread (http://localize.drupal.org/node/532), and state that you have read:
> - Our guidelines (http://localize.drupal.org/node/2074)
> - A translation guideline document for Norwegian written by another open source translation community
> - Our Drupal wordlist
> 
> (There are also a few who only have community moderation, not self moderation. They are left over from earlier -- when the self moderation permission appeared, we decided not to give it to existing moderators unless they asked for it.)
> 
> Translation membership is open, so all can join and submit suggestions.
> 
> All in all, 45 people have submitted translations.
> 
> We have about 200 oustanding suggestions now, some a year old or more, so I'd say it _is_ a problem, though not a very big one. However, there's no conflict or criticism around the outstanding suggestions. It would be pointless, really, since anyone who's willing to put in a minimum of effort can get permission to approve suggestions.
> 
> Norwegian Nynorsk (http://localize.drupal.org/translate/languages/nn) is an even smaller language, with similar setup. I just now discovered that someone has been waiting for 5 days before I saw him and gave him the priviledges he asked for, so that language obviously needs more admins. I'll go ask for volunteers on the board now.
> 
> Hilde (zirvap)
> 
> 
> 2011/10/7 Jose A. Reyero <drupal at reyero.net>
> 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
> 
> 
> 
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