Under Community Review

Add segment status checks to the QA checker

Description:

Studio and the Online Editor don’t provide QA checks for segments which haven’t been validated by the user (and which are therefore in Draft, Translation Rejected or Sign-Off Rejected status). This can cause 1) issues in the target file, and/or 2) missing segments in the TM.

Ideally we should have a configurable segment status QA check that can reject a file / send it back to translation if a segment doesn’t have the status Translated, Translation Approved or Signed Off. The check should be ‘bypassable’ for content that shouldn't go into the TM. Maybe in that case, the target segment can be left empty with the status Translated.

Example use cases:

  1. With the increasing usage of NMT, there’s a higher risk for instance that raw NMT output goes back to the client without any editing, i.e. the translator hasn’t post-edited NMT segments, and even though those segments have the status Draft, the target file is generated without any errors generated during the QA check.
  2. I’ve often seen examples as well of segments which have been corrected in batch mode (via Find & Replace a term for instance), and which have not been reconfirmed afterwards. Translators often don’t realise that when doing a Find & Replace action, the status of segments goes back to Draft or Translated Rejected. When the target file is generated, the file itself will be fine, but the corrections won’t be in the TM.
  3. I recently heard that this is also a request from the RWS Services team.
Fleur Schut
  • in reply to Patrik Mazanek

    Hi Patrik,

    especially when using the customer review step for SME review, reviewers that have this as an addon to their other work rarely know how to use all available features in my experience, therefore this kind of QA check for segment statuses would at least help in our situation as some otherwise may check the whole document but only change status values when they see something incorrect. I would consider this functionality as very useful.

  • Translators/Reviewers can very well use display filters to check segments in specific statuses - just use the features already available. I doubt the translators who don't know how to use display filters will check the verification messages.

  • Hi Fleur,

    What a coincidence! I was about to submit the exact same idea as you. My original post and comments are below.

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    Our team would like to see a segment status check implemented because we have programs where we want to maintain certain levels of quality in the TM and in those projects, only accept segments with the status Translation Approved or Signed Off. Essentially, only segments that have been reviewed should be saved to the TM.

    While the above is configurable within the project settings, there currently lacks any functionality to restrict editors from submitting the task unless all segment statuses are properly updated to Translation Approved. This is resulting in missed translations being saved to the TM.

    Current situation:

    1. Editors review a segment, make changes, and confirm as Translation Approved - This is good.
    2. Editors review a segment and are satisfied with the translation and don't confirm as Translation Approved - This is bad and results in missed segments in the TM.

    We try to instruct our editors to follow the desired procedure to have all segments of Translation Approved status, but as we know, it's not always possible to rely on users to 1) remember these instructions or 2) to follow them. That is why having this type of segment status check would be incredible to have.

    I think ideally this type of check should be configurable such that:

    1. We can specify that all statuses in the file should be one or more of the following before it can be submitted: Translated, Translation Approved, Signed Off (we should be able to choose which ones we want)
    2. Due to the way that translations are currently leveraged in TE, they all show up as Translated status regardless if they were saved as Translation Approved in the TM. It would be great if there was a bypass we could have for these Translated + Locked segments since we would not expect users to update the statuses for these segments as well.

    Fleur makes some excellent points about the other use cases as well, the above that I mentioned is just an example that's a hot topic within my team currently.