1772631 - [Survey]: translation quality issues for Firefox Translation extension

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Mozilla Localizations :: Other, task)

Description

[Peiying Mo [:CocoMo]]

The localized surveys can be found here

The original localization request can be found in Jira issue L10NV-31

Issues reported:
(1). I'm French and this survey is very poorly translated, it's a pain to answer.

"Apprendre à utiliser ce plugin était facile "
"Je crois que je pourrais rapidement devenir productif·ve si j'utilisais ce plugin "
" J'ai pu rapidement finaliser les tâches et les scénarios en me servant de ce plugin "
" Le système garantit la sécurité "
" Le système fait preuve d'intégrité "

etc , those questions are really unclear and poorly written (i know it's automatically translated and no one checked the result ...). I tried answering but you cannot trust the results of such vague questions (in French).

(2). Evgeny reports: "I also double-checked the Russian version and it mostly looks good to me, except for one question where the meaning was changed ("How familiar are you with the translated language you used?" they translated as "Насколько хорошо вы знаете язык, на котором проходили опрос? " which means "How familiar are you with the language of the survey?"). I'll fix this myself.

Comment 1

[Peiying Mo [:CocoMo]]

Attachment: Russian translation

Comment 2

[Peiying Mo [:CocoMo]]

Attachment: French translation

Comment 3

[Peiying Mo [:CocoMo]]

I can always ask the agency to check the work by a different translator to validate the feedback we got.

From the above screenshots, the French is close to the English source when translated back. Is it the questions that the survey taker had an issue or is it the translation that is an issue. We need specifics, not just "bad" or "wrong".

Comment 4

[Evgeny Pavlov]

Thank you for investigating this!

We cannot ask the user what was meant by this because the survey is anonymous.

As a non-native English speaker, I feel like the phrasing of the survey could've been simpler but it was provided to us by a third party and we have an obligation to run it through the product launch which has already started. So I apologize if this caused the issues.

I looked deeper into Russian and when we look at the rest of the translations except the one I already mentioned they make sense, but sometimes change the meaning a little and altogether do not look great.
For example, first two questions were translated with the same meaning:
"Overall, I am satisfied with how easy it is to use this plugin" as "В целом меня устраивает простота использования этого плагина " and
"It was simple to use this plugin" as "Использовать этот плагин было легко ".
I'm not a native English speaker, so I can't grasp what are the nuances here. Probably the translators couldn't either.
Another example of slightly changed meaning is:
"The system behaves in an underhanded manner" as "Система не вызывает у меня доверия" which means "I don't trust the system".
Taking into account that:
"The system has integrity" was translated as "Система целостна и заслуживает доверия " and
"I can trust the system" as "Я могу доверять системе " (this one is right),
alls three mean almost the same.

Maybe it's asking too much and more advanced words are just not easily translatable from English but I think the translators might have tried to look at a document as a whole and try to understand what differences the author meant here.

As for French, we should ask a native speaker to take a look first, maybe the issues are similar.

Comment 5

[Peiying Mo [:CocoMo]]

@Evgeny, the French translator's feedback: he actually does not agree with the feedback. He feels that his translation is very clear but he will keep this in mind.

I am waiting for the Russian translator's feedback. The original one can't be reached because they can't get payment from the west because of the sanction. The agency would look for resources they use outside of Russia for feedback. Sorry it took so long to get any feedback at this point.

Comment 6

[Evgeny Pavlov]

Thanks! We're good with French then and we can assume that this person complained about the questions, not the translation. I found one major issue for Russian which I fixed myself, everything else is again probably the result of the very similar questions.

Comment 7

[Peiying Mo [:CocoMo]]

@Evgeny, the feedback from a different Russian translator (not the one working on this piece) came back with this feedback: From what I can see the Russian translation is accurate, except in "The system behaves in an underhanded manner" - I would use another way for "underhanded". But still, the meaning was not twisted.

Note, we asked the reviewer to take a look of the overall survey, not pointing where we have an issue so the person can form his/her own opinion on the quality of the work.

Comment 8

[Evgeny Pavlov]

ok, thank you!