Ability to temporarily block translation editors & show a warning

[eclare]

I’m not sure if this is the case only for my locale, but lately there’s been more & more submissions that are obviously just imported *.po files, which were translated using Google Translate and with no further inspection.

The plugin / theme authors think that someone did a great job and ask for PTE rights for such a person.

As most strings are short, about 50% of such translations are correct, while the rest is garbage – totally wrong even for really easy & obvious strings (example: “Dashboard” was translated to “Dashboard of a car” in my language). That aside, no PHP context is considered for such translations.

This means that reviewing such submissions requires literally making the translation from the start, reviewing the context, fixing the lost letter capitalization, correcting inconsistencies. A GTE would therefore do the translation as if there was none. This does not help, it actually takes up the GTE’s and project author’s time. This is the opposite of what helping in translation is.

If such garbage is submitted and it’s obvious that it’s an automatic translation (not just a case of not sticking to the conventions), I myself reject all Waiting strings submitted by such a user for that project.

Here are my requests:

1. Easy: somewhere near the *.po import buttons, place a warning saying “If you submit a translation which was done automatically (like using Google Translate) and isn’t manually corrected, ALL the strings will be rejected, even if a lot of them came out correctly. If you did the whole translation manually, you don’t need to worry.”. Maybe even warn: “You will be blocked from further submission to all projects for 2 weeks.”.
2. Enable the GTEs to actually block translation submission from such accounts, for 2 weeks seems fine.
3. Enable GTEs to bulk-remove all non-accepted translations made by a user for all projects at once.

Discussion: ​https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/2019/02/09/ability-to-temporary-block-translators-who-submit-garbage/

[Nao]

Mockup of "Don't upload machine translation" note

[Nao]

I agree that this will be an improvement for improving quality & reducing reviewer work.

For request 1, I think it's good to have a short one-line message with a link to a Polyglots Handbook page explaining issues with unreviewed machine translations (to be created). I illustrated my suggestion in the attached image.

[eclare]

I think that "machine-generated" is not clear enough. An example (Google Translate) should be added. And your proposal doesn't have enough seriousness in it to really make one think about what (s)he's adding, imho. Thank you for the screenshot and proposal, Nao.

[Luciano Croce]

Replying to eclare:

Here are my requests:

1. Easy: somewhere near the *.po import buttons, place a warning saying “If you submit a translation which was done automatically (like using Google Translate) and isn’t manually corrected, ALL the strings will be rejected, even if a lot of them came out correctly. If you did the whole translation manually, you don’t need to worry.”. Maybe even warn: “You will be blocked from further submission to all projects for 2 weeks.”.
2. Enable the GTEs to actually block translation submission from such accounts, for 2 weeks seems fine.
3. Enable GTEs to bulk-remove all non-accepted translations made by a user for all projects at once.

Very good, but I suggest more other steps:

4. Banning "declared" spammers from the translation platform.
5. Blocking (temporarily ?) contributors that make translations in languages different from the target: for example contributors that send Latin strings (or other slangs) in English UK context (or similar cases).
6. Extend all these features to PTE's too.
7. Notify of all corrective actions. For example: PTE's corrective actions is notified to GTE's -> GTE's corrective actions is notified to LM's -> LM's corrective actions is notified to Global Mentor's.
8. Add the possibility to enable/disable this type of notifications (described in step 7) in personal control panel of PTE/GTE/LM.
9. Optionally report to themes/plugins review team the author that deliberalely make readme.txt or themes/plugins file in languages different from the en_US (this case make impossibility to PTE/GTE to make propery translations/corrections).
10. Optionally reject all Latin strings in English UK context (for example).