I’ve been working on an app for GNOME for a couple of months. Recently my app has gotten a little attention, and people have started to work on translations for it. While I love that people are willing to do so, I don’t know what the criteria for accepting these MRs should be. My biggest concern is that someone uses bad language/trolls the translation. That could “easily” be prevented by using a translator tool on the MR and checking that it is a serious translation. While not ideal, I can live with that. My secondary concern is quality. Should I always wait for at least a second review by a native speaker before merging MRs?
I’d suggest a translation platform like Weblate. I can highly recommend it, it’s free for Open Source projects. Of course there are alternatives if you don’t like it.
If you stick with MRs: My recommendation is to trust your contributors. It’s unlikely you will get reviews. Don’t expect evil intentions, and even if there were, users can write bug reports.
If your project is in GNOME GitLab, I highly recommend that you to use GNOME’s Damned Lies because translation teams have roles, and translator (lowest role) can’t push translations to the repository. Reviewer can’t either, but can proofread it. Committer and coordinator can push it. A language team coordinator is promoted or demoted only by GNOME Translation Project (GTP) administrators. So there is some control in this organization.
If your project is in other source code forges, then I recommend using Weblate as it is FLOSS and has libre hosting plan for free software. Its translation workflow by default is to be enough the translator contribution, but it is possible to change it to peer review or dedicated review. See Translation Workflows.
Personally I’m not much a fan of MR translation because normally it is on the translator to update the PO Template in order to get the latest source strings to be translated. Besides, this translation platforms normally have some kind of quality checks that pop up error messages in case of mistakes (Damned Lies won’t accept upload of broken PO file, Weblate warns in case of missing placeholder, etc.)
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@rafaelff pretty much said it all. I just want to clarify that if you get your application added to Damned lies, then you should not accept translation through any other means as that well undermine the process.
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