Proofreaders' QA Checker: Ensuring Quality Translations

What's a QA checker? What does it do? Everything you need to know is on this page.

🧰 What's a QA Checker?

The quality assurance checker – or QA checker, for short – is a tool used by project managers to ensure quality translations. It checks for formal errors that may have been missed by translators (such as double spaces or missing characters).

👥 Who can use the QA checker?

The QA checker is only accessible to proofreaders and project managers.

🔧 What does it do?

Specific translation elements will be checked to make sure that translations are consistent and that they don’t cause any unwanted bugs. After running the checker, proofreaders will have to edit target translations to fix QA issues and approve them again manually.

Note that QA checker settings can only be edited by project managers or owner.

The QA checker currently checks for:

Setting	Description
Empty translations	If the source string contains data but your translation doesn’t, an error message will be displayed.
Tag mismatch	If tags (as well as ID attributes and CDATA tags) are inconsistent between the source and the translation, you will receive an error message. This is useful for strings that may contain tags used in code.
Spaces mismatch	If there are any missing spaces or too many spaces in a row, an error message will be displayed.
Variable mismatch	If the source string contains variables, they must be copied and pasted as such, and not translated. If the variables differ from the source string, a warning message will be displayed.
”Incorrect translation” issues	If an issue is open indicating that the “current translation is wrong”, a warning message will be displayed.
ICU syntax	If the ICU message syntax isn’t correct, an error message will be displayed.
Duplicate translation	If the translation already exists, an error message will be displayed.

QA error types:

There are two types of QA errors:

Error messages, which will prevent translation approvals until flagged errors are removed or edited.

Warning messages, which will not prevent translation approvals.

Note: removed the special character mismatch setting due to false positive errors on bracket usage.

🧐 How do I open the QA checker?

To open the QA checker, you can use proofreading mode or the translation editor:

1. Using proofreading mode to open the QA checker:

To open the proofreading mode, click on the language you wish to check and press the "Proofread" button in the dropdown menu.edit

Once proofreading mode is enabled, display strings that have been flagged by the QA checker using the "QA issues" > "All" filter, on the top left part of the editor.

Translation errors will now be displayed in red text under flagged strings. An explanation on how to fix these errors will also be provided.

To resolve these issues, simply edit translations according to the QA check report and approve the translation.

2. Using the translation editor to open the QA checker:

By enabling the "QA issues" > "All" filter (on the top left part of the editor), you can display QA issues directly onto the translation editor – right under the translation field, preexisting translations, and MT results.

To resolve these issues, simply edit translations according to the QA check report and approve the translation.

Now, you're all set to resolve QA issues!

If you wish to know more about the QA checker, you can check out Crowdin's documentation on Quality Assurance checks.