Quality Assurance

In this page we discuss various items related to Quality Assurance of Arabeyes translations.

هذه الصفحة موجودة بالعربية تحت عنوان مراجعة الجودة

Gnome QA

Stages

We decided to split the process of QA into levels or stages; stage 1 and stage 2.

Stage I In this stage we cover the following items

• Typo errors.
• Switch to imperative form instead of noun for actions (like Copy, Paste, Move and so on).
• Fix mistranslated strings; due to misunderstanding of the English text, use of inappropriate Arabic and so on.
• Unifying used terms, based on the new Technical Glossary.
• Rephrasing mysterious translations to be more clear and understandable.

Currently the above is assigned to Khaled Hosny, underway.

• Fix Plural Forms.

We maintain a list of files that pass this stage in the cvs, here

Stage II In this stage we manage to fix the more complicated grammatical and other lingual stuff.

A Volunteer with good lingual skills is needed.

Common mistakes

We can say that most of errors and mistakes are caused by one of this:

• Multiple translators working on the same file:

When a translators starts to work on a partially translated file, in most cases he start working on fuzzy and untranslated strings directly without reading the translated ones. This result in all forms of conflicts. For example the same term may be translated by different Arabic ones. Also sometimes different English terms are translated by the same Arabic term, e.g. some one was translating both "title" and "address" as "عنوان" in the same file, now in the print preferences dialog (where these stings belong) the user has to check boxes with the word "عنوان", how he is supposed to differentiate between both?.

• Lack of unified glossary.

This is one of the most common causes.

• Misunderstanding the English text.

overwrite: some one translated it as تنميق ! (this is somewhat common)

• Ignoring Comments

Many mistakes could be avoided if the translator reads the comments (i.e. lines starting with `#' character) in the PO file. e.x. in gtk+ PO file, some stings start with "keyboard label|" which should not included in the translation and this is explained in the comment.

Some weird translations

• أدات for أداة !
• Colophon: الورقة الأخيرة المحتوية على معلومات حول الناشر و الكاتب !

Note: `This is used as a default title for colophon elements.'

• صنتيميتر!! this wasn't a typo!