When peer review goes pear shaped

Well I’m glad I asked. What happened was this…

I had a request from someone asking if I could localize TinyMCE (a WYSIWYG editor – think of it as a miniature form of Word sitting within a website) so they could use it on their website for their Gaelic-speaking editors. There aren’t that many strings and the project is handled on Transifex using po files so the process seemed straight-forward too (if you don’t know what a po file is  – the main thing about them is that there are many translation memory packages which handle them and, if you have already done LibreOffice or something like that and stored those strings in the memory, there will be few strings in a project like TinyMCE for which there are no translation memory suggestions. In a nutshell – it allows an experienced software translator to work much faster).

So off I go. Pretty much a cake-walk, half a Bond film and 2 episodes of Big Bang later, the job was done. Now in many cases once a language has been accepted for translation and when you have translated all or at least most of the project, these translations will show up in the released program eventually. But just because I’m a suspicious old fart (by now), I messaged the admins and asked about the process of getting them released. Good thing too. Turns out they use an API to pull the translations from Transifex and onto their system (they’ve basically automated that step, which I can understand). The catch however is that it only grabs translations set to Reviewed.

Cue a groan from me. To cut the TinyMCE story short at this point, it seems this is down to Transifex (at least according to the TinyMCE admin) so they were quite happy for me to just breeze through them and set them to Reviewed myself. Fortunately it wasn’t a large job so 15 minutes later (admittedly, I have a about 14 other jobs on my desk just now which I would have rather done…), they were all set, thank goodness to keyboard shortcuts.

But back to the groan. I have come across this approach before and on the face of it, it makes sense. If you do community translation (i.e. you let a bunch of volunteers from the web translate into languages you as admins don’t understand and don’t have time to QA) but you’d like to have at least some measure of QA over the translations, by adding this step of peer reviewing, you can be at least more or less sure that you’re not getting ‘Jamie is a dork’ and ‘Muahahaha’ type translations.

The only problem is, peer review in online localization relies on large number of volunteers. Only a small percentage of speakers have any inclination towards translating pro bono publico and even fewer feel like reviewing other people’s translations (there is something slightly obscene about proofreading, it’s like having someone else put words in your mouth, they almost always taste funny…). I once did some rough and ready stats on the percentages of people of a given language who will be engaged in not-for-profit localization (of mainstream projects like Firefox or LibreOffice). It’s about ONE active localizer for every 500,000 speakers. So German can call upon something like 20 really active localizers. Scottish Gaelic on the other hand statistically has … well, it has less than 60,000 speakers. You work it out. So it’s seriously blessed by having TWO of them.

In any case, even if you disbelieve my figures (I’d be the first to admit to not being great shakes at numbers), the percentages are really small. So if you set up a translation process that necessitates not only translation but also peer review, you’re essentially screwing small languages because the chances are there will never be a reviewer with enough time or energy (never mind ability) to review stuff. It’s one of the reasons why we haven’t touched WhatsApp yet, they simply won’t let a translation into live without review.

So if you design a process like that and want to make sure you’re not creating big problems for smaller languages (and we’re not just talking Gaelic-style tiny languages, even languages like Kazakh or Estonian have such problems) make sure you

• allow enough wriggle-room to over-ride such requirements, for example by allowing a localizer to demonstrate their credentials (for example through long-term participation in other projects) and
• design a system where, if it’s absolutely necessary to set specific tags, admins can bulk-tag translations for a certain language.

Over and out.