How do you know if the translations in your site are great, OK or require corrections? Are there any translation glitches that make your business look funny? If you’re not sure, you’re also not alone. But, a solution is coming.
Our own site, WPML.org, is running 11 languages. We translate a lot of content on a regular basis. Some of this content is simple but some is highly technical. It’s hard for us to review every translation in every language. I bet that it’s even harder for others, who don’t have staff that speaks all the languages of the site.
We also know that your Website is your reputation. Anything that’s written in a weird way makes you look unprofessional. It doesn’t matter if you wrote it yourself or if it got translated for you. It’s still on your site.
Exactly for this purpose, we are starting to build now a new module for WPML, which will allow you to collect feedback about the quality of your translations and update whatever needs improvement.
A Translation Feedback Form on the Front-end Pages
The feedback module will allow you to add a little indication on newly translated pages, saying that they were translated.
You’ll be able to choose which pages will display this button. For example, you can select that only translation from English to French, completed in the last 21 days will display the feedback request. You will also have complete control over where on the page it appears and how it looks.
When visitors click on the translation feedback button, they can rate the translation.
If visitors select low rating (from OK down), they can also enter an explanation of what’s wrong.
Moderating and Handling Feedback
You will have a new admin screen which lists all the feedback that you received. You can filter it by ‘requiring action’ (translation that needs fixing). You’ll decide what feedback you want to handle and what to discard (like people asking for your phone number using this feedback).
To handle this feedback, you have two choices:
- Edit the translation yourself and indicate that the issue is resolved
- Send the issue to the translator who wrote that page
WPML knows exactly who translated everything, so it will assign the issue to the correct translator or translation service.
To you, it doesn’t matter. WPML will notify the translator (or service). The translator can either change the translation or send you a message with an explanation. This way, you have tracking of what issues are resolved and what need some attention. In any case, you will know that everything that people reported gets handled.
Schedule and Account
This project is in the “GUI and definition state” right now. It means that we’re working on the user interface design and working out the last details. We’re looking forward to your feedback, to know if you find this feature useful and if you’d like to see it any differently.
We’d like to close the definition by the end of February and then complete the development until May. There’s a lot more work than appears because we need to communicate feedback to different translation services that we’re working with.
Since anyone using WPML is dealing with translations, this module will be available for all WPML accounts (Multilingual Blog and CMS).
Feedback?
What do you think? Would you use this in your sites? If not, why?
Leave your comments and we’ll get back to you.