Preventing future English related Translation Issues

Development i18n
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Hello Everyone!

A couple weeks back @sambapete noticed an odd bug in the edx-platform Transifex Project and brought it to my attention. I’m summarizing it here for reference.

Five strings in analytics-dashboard and one string in analytics-dashboard-js were not in English to be translated to other languages, but were actually in Turkish Romanian. This comes from an accident where an English-to-Turkish English-to-Romanian translator accidentally pushed their translations to the English language, instead of the Turkish Romanian language. These translations were then pushed back into the GitHub Repository edx-analytics-dashboard. And when new translations were requested, instead of providing English to all translators, it provided certain lines in Turkish Romanian instead.

We have fixed the problem by removing the strings at fault in #1308, deleting the related English to English Translation Memory, and re-uploading all the English .po files. As part of that solution we have decided to disallow access to translating from English-to-English to reduce any future errors of this type.

A future problem we will have to deal with in every project is that because we allow for anyone to become a translator (approval is set to automatic), anyone can become a translator from English to English. So this problem that was solved in one project could already exist or materialize in the future in other projects.

My proposal is that we remove English as an option to translate into for every project, specifically from en_us to en as this was the source of the propagated error. I also think we should review which English variations (GB, HK, CA) we keep. And lastly, we should do a review of which languages are currently supported by translators and are being requested by users.

Pleas let me know what you think about this below!

Edits:

  1. Thank you to @uetuluk for pointing out the language was Romanian and not Turkish.
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Do the incorrect translations refer to these strings?

#: analytics_dashboard/core/templates/core/landing.html:15
#: analytics_dashboard/templates/_skip_link.html:3
msgid "Skip to content"
msgstr "Sari la conținut "

#: analytics_dashboard/core/templates/core/landing.html:23
msgid "Login"
msgstr "Autentificare"

#: analytics_dashboard/core/templates/core/landing.html:33
msgid "Insights to help course teams improve courses."
msgstr "Perspective pentru a ajuta echipele să își îmbunătățească cursurile. "

#: analytics_dashboard/core/templates/core/landing.html:42
#: analytics_dashboard/courses/views/__init__.py:603
msgid "Who are my learners?"
msgstr "Cine sunt elevii mei? "

#: analytics_dashboard/core/templates/core/landing.html:43
msgid "Target your course to fit the backgrounds of your learners."
msgstr "Direcționați-vă cursul petru a se potrivi cu mediul cursanților dumneavoastră. "

These strings are not in Turkish, but in Romanian according to Google Translate.

Turkey is currently a sensitive topic, so I would like to avoid any misunderstandings.

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3

Thank you for pointing out the mistake. I’ll replace it in the original post!

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