Trialling a new process for submitting translation errors (official courses)

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Hi all,

As you may know, we currently ask our users to come here to the community forums to report any translation errors they have found on our official courses. We found this to be a lengthy process, both for our users (many of whom do not hold a community account) and for us, as threads can get crowded, making it difficult to ensure we’ve covered everything.

With that, the Support and Content teams have been working together to come up with a solution to make this process better and faster.

As a first step, over the next month we will be asking users to submit translation errors they have spotted on our official Memrise courses here: https://memri.se/translation-errors. These reports will then be straight in the hands of our Content team, who will make any necessary changes at the earliest availability. Please note that as this is a trial, we are starting with the form questions in English only.

As before, if you have found an error on a community-created course, please visit http://community.memrise.com/c/community-created-courses/7 and post it under the relevant course section. If you cannot find a section for your chosen course, please feel free to create a new thread.

Please bear with us as we run this test and iron out any flaws along the way. Fingers crossed this will lead to a smoother error-reporting process overall, both for our users and us as a team :slight_smile:

Best wishes,
Memrise team

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This has the potential to be a welcome addition. Is there going to be a link to the report form on each course homepage and, if not, how will people know about it? Would it be helpful to include a box on the report form for us to give the course url? Are you intending to report back on the actions you have taken?

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Nice to see that you’re working on improving the general situation there!

Please make sure that you make it easy for users to report things. I. e., there should be a button in both the web and the apps that pre-fills the required fields:

  • source language
  • target language
  • course
  • word/phrase/etc in question

Users would thus only have to concentrate on reporting the problem, not repeatedly filling out the fields above.
Take a look at the way Duolingo solved this - I think they’ve got it pretty much spot on!

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Great news - however this might work better if it returned to the old Forum style that were directly accessible from within the course. (As has just been said: this is still a remote access that people need be made aware of and go somewhere else to access it).

(I must admit this is how I have been treating the official MemRise language forums.)

I have posted many questions and observations - especially in ► Italian ◄ (almost my native tongue),

and the first post said

Please post any feedback and suggestions about the official Memrise-created Italian courses here.
Our Language Specialists will then look into it.

I do have a question:

  1. Will these previously reported issues be picked up or would you like me to do a copy and paste job, as many are still waiting to be dealt with?

However, I do like the clever standard form with drop-down menus, sifting issues into categories :slight_smile:
That should help make it clearer what the issue is.

Questions:

  1. Will we be able to see what has been reported or might this lead to duplicate reports?
    (At least with the Official Forums, sometimes the community is able to answer a question.)

  2. And will we get an answer - ie confirmation if some action was taken? (That’s how I often learn.)

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Very much agree with what others had said.

Besides,

  • this form is not convenient if you have to report many mistakes. If there are dozens of incorrect translations, to fill this form so many times would take so much time.

  • I’ve just reported an issue, but there’s no track on it for me. I mean I should keep my own record somewhere to not forget about what I’ve reported.

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It’s good news you will be correcting errors again. I have submitted the first part of my backlog from the past year. It really is a lot of work though submitting them individually.

If you’re going to keep this form for submitting errors then would you please

  • add to type of error: identical translations (which are a big problem)
  • give information about the time frame in which we can expect a reaction
  • make publicly available what’s been reported already

Also where can we ask questions about the courses? I’ve doubts about some translations but I would not say they’re totally wrong.

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I agree (me too). I guess we continue to use the ‘official 1 -7’ thread - which often community members kindly answer for us.

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Hi all,

Thanks for your feedback! I’ll try answer all I can in one message:

At the moment, we have made the link to this form visible in our FAQs, here in the forum and for those reaching out to Support directly regarding translation errors. We want to see how and if it works first of all before we think about putting something like this on our main website or in the app.

Regarding adding the course URL, as long as users select the correct source and target languages from the drop down lists, we will be able to locate the course and item :grinning: We can see some of you have put the course link in the details section of the form and that’s fine too!

I’ve tried playing with the settings a little on this form and it would seem you can only have the email field compulsory, and at this stage we don’t want to make users give us their email. This does mean, unfortunately, that users won’t get a copy of their report and we can’t get back to each user when they’ve reported a mistake to say it has or hasn’t been corrected. While this will save the team time (and in turn give more time to correcting errors), we understand it’s important for users to hear back. So, I am making a note of all feedback on this so we can discuss together with the Content team how to make it feasible.

Another issue with this form is that you can only have the option to see others’ responses after you have submitted your own- which will defeat the object of trying to avoid duplicate entries :sweat_smile: Moving forward, we’ll need to see if we can find a better system for this. The good news is that since we can now sort and categorise reports more easily, it should be simple for our language specialists to spot and merge duplicates.

@DW7 No need to resubmit any of your previous submissions. These have been picked up and are being worked on over the coming weeks :slight_smile:

@Hombre_sin_nombre Thanks for your point regarding having many errors to submit. For now, if you have a few to report on the same course, you can put them in one report and note that you found the error in ‘multiple’.

@duaal I’ve now added a new option for error type -‘Identical/duplicate translation’. I’ve also noted your feedback on giving users an expected timeframe for a response. This will depend from language to language so it can be difficult to give this accurately, but we’ll discuss ways to improve this in the new process.

Please feel free to continue to use the forum to discuss your thoughts and ask questions! Just note that these are not being actively checked by the team for corrections currently.

If you have any more thoughts, do let us know.

Best wishes,
Honor
Memrise team

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That’s probably true for the courses from English but less so for the courses from other languages.

And the last appearance on the forum from the person Memrise hired for courses from Dutch is now a year ago.

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Does that mean that you and your colleagues are no longer monitoring the forums for error reports and the only way to inform you guys is via the webform …?

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Have you seen the size of the details field? How can you type multiple issues in it?

Honestly, guys, you are making it a lot more complicated. The only plus point is that new users don’t have to have a forum account to report an issue, but

  1. It’s not a problem to get notifications on forum threads. I don’t understand how another notification system could improve correction process.

  2. There would be no feedback, which means

  • we should check our reported items manually and still be in the unknown about reports, because you could disregard them totally or not have enough time to make corrections
  • no discussions between users and your team; controversial items would be translated in favour of your language specialists and those items still can be erroneous
  • less engagement for your team, whose presence in many cases already was ghost-like
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They won’t be monitored over the next month, at least, while we trial this. So, yes, we ask that users submit via the form.

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As far as I can tell, there is no limit in the details field, so there shouldn’t be any problems entering multiple issues :slight_smile:

Collecting the translation errors in a form such as this means that we can have the information categorised automatically and ready to send out to the relevant team and/or language specialist. The idea behind this is to quicken up the whole process and give more time to making the corrections.

I think this is great feedback regarding keeping open discussions between Memrise and the users. As I said, we’re tracking user feedback as well as the form responses, so we have a better idea of the next steps when reviewing this at the end of the month. Please keep in mind that this is the very first stage of us trialling something we hope will make things better and faster for all and is by no means the final product!

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Maybe I’m totally missing something, but what is there to categorise? Most of us have our own courses and we know what it takes to make a correction. Those forum threads worked out well before, but all of a sudden you can’t follow them? Users are investing their own free time to improve official courses and you don’t have enough of your working time to change a thing or two and to leave an answer? I don’t know, it sounds like a red-tapism in a Kafka’s novel.

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Many thanks for that :arrow_up:

I think I will continue adding possible translation errors to the official 1 - 7 thread, then add below it something like.
Reported on web-form

So I remember, others are made aware of the issue, and it may help to reduce duplication.
I might even add the solution as a Post Script if I become aware of it.

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Yes. Or Drops app. You just report a word or a sentence right there where you encounter it in the app

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@MemriseSupport

How your little experiment is going on? Not much presence of your language specialists lately, no feedback on correction process as it was expected.

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What’s this option supposed to be?

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Hi all,

Apologies for the delayed response- we’ve been working with the Content team to get an update on this!

First of all, thank you for flagging this @Vikestart, this must have been added accidentally when updating the form last :thinking: this has now been removed!

In regards to an update on this process:

Since launching this in October, we’ve collected 234 reports via the form. Where possible (i.e where the user’s report was clear and our linguists were able to locate the issue), corrections have been made for languages where we have internal linguists (French, German, Japanese, Spanish, English, Korean). We plan to have Dutch reports resolved in the coming weeks also, however these take a little longer as we work with an external linguist.

125 of the reports are for Italian for Russian speakers, so I deduce many of these have come from you @Hombre_sin_nombre (if so, thank you!). The plan is to have most of these corrected by the end of the year, however this time frame is not set in stone as it depends how much of the work requires our Russian language specialist to work with an external Italian linguist (this adds time and admin steps).

Many thanks for your patience on this. Hoping this helps for now,
Memrise team

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125 of the reports are for Italian for Russian speakers, so I deduce many of these have come from you @Hombre_sin_nombre

You said that you picked up reports from your official courses pages, so a lot of Italian ones were from me :wink:

[Course Forum] Italian 1-7 by Memrise - #304 by Hombre_sin_nombre

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