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

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.

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 …?

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.

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.

What’s this option supposed to be?

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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I hope this form is still being tracked. :slight_smile:

Not sure why this isn’t pinned/stickied? And why the link to this form isn’t visible in more places.

Going back to review some older vocab, I was pleased to see that a lot of what I had reported had been changed. That’s great! :slight_smile:

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Great to hear that the errors you have submitted have been changed! It’s true that our Content team and our external linguists are working hard and more frequently to review the reports coming in. I’ve pinned this post and we’ve tried to make the form more visible, but let us know where you think would be a good place to display it🙂

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@stupidman07 please report this via the form https://memri.se/translation-errors and our language experts will take a look :slightly_smiling_face:

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I’ve checked Italian courses, you still have errors in submitted items. By this fact we can make a simple deduction: unfortunately, you guys don’t give a damn about quality of your courses.