I have started translating Electron docs to Turkish for a while ago. At first, coverage of translations on Turkish was %3 on that project.
After I have got a couple of approvals on Utopian about Electron translations, I have noticed that other contributors on Utopian started bombarding the project with translations.
That was happy news, right? Electron is a good project and people actually care to translate the huge documentation.
Today, I had a look to other contributors and checked their translations if they're okay or not. Sadly, most of them are bad translations.
I don't accuse anyone to use Google Translate or other machine translate tools. However, I can't imagine, Turkish people try to learn Electron by using this Turkish translations. They would probably just give up learning it.
The problem
Translation is a serious business. If you need to translate a Javascript framework docs, you actually need to know in order:
- Basic programming
- Javascript
- Related framework
If you have no idea about the context, you will %100 end up with bad translations.
Also, even you know these things but you don't know both languages well, it is highly possible that you will also end up with bad translations.
Current state of translation contributions
I really wonder the percent of the translations actually merged into the open-source projects those accepted at Utopian as a valid contribution.
Numbers are good at the first glance. Even Crowdin's quarterly business reports probably had a boost due to contributions via Utopian. However, I have an educated guess that only %3-5 of the translations actually has the required quality to be an approved contribution.
Utopian try to adapt itself on translations to fight with low-quality translations and abuse from the start. It is now harder to create an accepted contribution in this category.
However, I don't think that the current rules are helpful to the open-source community due to "bounty hunter' low-quality translators. They adapt, too. They learned how to create "pull requests". And basic file edits are much easier then Crowdin translation page.
Actually, I can create a program that automatically creates pull requests with an automated google-translate on different languages.
We're on a state that bounty hunters will start hurting open-source maintainers' time by sending zero quality contributions. If the maintainer can't find a proof-reader worse thing these non-sense translations can actually be merged into the upstream. Because open-source world has a built-in trust normally.
The solution
None. As long as Utopian rewards translations with that $$$$, people always find ways to abuse it. I was enjoying the "no Crowdin" rule because it eliminates most of the abusers. With the upcoming collaboration with Crowdin, the situation may be better, but It doesn't look like it's working right now.
Contribute to get rewards
This is the biggest side effect. Translations category has problems but abuse is in place almost all categories. That's because, people actually "contribute" to get rewards. Contributors should think that the rewards as an extra compensation. (may happen or not.) But I am pretty sure, a lot of people see that as a kind of gig.
End of the rant.