What are your default QA check settings?

This is a discussion held at the Studio Beta Group Forum. Since you have to be a member of that group to read it, and since it is quite interesting, I have obtained permission from the participants to publish it here.

Daniel Brockmann

Now that CU2 is out the door, I would love to hear from you on a specific topic. We are currently designing QA checks for the Online Editor environment, and “reinventing” them to some extent for that context. One question that came up was what typical default settings for QA checks are. Studio just has the forgotten check and nothing else enabled – which we believe is making its use a bit more difficult than if some other checks would already be available by default. So – against that background – can I ask you to reply here with the defaults you typically change? Obviously many of you also have specific RegEx checks etc. – maybe for those you can just say at a high level “I add my own regex checks” or so. A high-level list would be best.

Marco Rognoni 

I usually include the following:

Check for repeated words in target

Check that source and target end with the same punctuation

Check for multiple spaces

Claudio Nasso 

Regarding your QA checks question, these are my custom settings, compared to those already checked or unchecked by default:

  • Segment verification > Source and target are identical
  • Segments to Exclude > Exclude exact matches
  • Segments to Exclude > Exclude repetitions
  • Segments to Exclude > Exclude locked segment
  • Inconsistencies > Check for inconsistent translations
  • Inconsistencies > Check for repeated words in target
  • Inconsistencies > Check for unedited fuzzy matches
  • Punctuation > Check that source and target end with the same punctuation
  • Punctuation > Check for unintentional spaces before (applies to Italian, in my case)
  • Punctuation > Check for multiple spaces
  • Punctuation > Check for multiple dots
  • Punctuation > Check for multiple dots > Ignore ellipsis dots (…)
  • Punctuation > Check for extra space at the end of target segment
  • Punctuation > Check brackets
  • Numbers > Check numbers
  • Numbers > Check times
  • Numbers > Check dates
  • Numbers > Check measurements
  • Trademark check > Check trademarks characters
  • Length limitations > Check length limitation (only when necessary)
  • Tag verifier > Ignore formatting tags (in this case I uncheck it)
  • Verification settings > Ignore locked segments
  • Verification settings > Enable recognition of two-letters terms
  • Number verifier > Number verifier settings > Exclude tag text
  • Number verifier > Number verifier settings > All source thousands separators > Period (applies to Italian, in my case)
  • Number verifier > Number verifier settings > All decimal separators > Comma (applies to Italian, in my case)

Marco Rognoni 

Hi Claudio,

That’s a lot of QA checks! 🙂

Personally my experience is that by adding so many checks you always get a lot of errors, and it takes more time to verify each of them in Studio rather than manually check them during review/proofreading stages before delivery.

Of course each of us has a personal way of working, so I totally understand that you may prefer to have all those checks in place.

This shows that Daniel’s question is very interesting, and most likely each reply will be different based on the established method of every single linguist.

Claudio Nasso 

Hi Marco,

you are right, enabling all my proposed verification items may generate lot of errors/warnings/notes, but this is true only when the review/editing stages of a translated project have been carried out in an inadequate way.

When the reviewing/proofreading stages have been correctly carried out, the number of “errors/warnings/notes” will be much less, and they will further help us to spot those we have forgotten.

Moreover, after having set general custom QA checks, pairing them to the proper “signal” (I mean “Error”, “Warning” or “Note”), we have an option to show just the desired “signal”, or to disable some of them before running the “Verify” function on a particular project.

But, as you have pointed out, the choice of custom QA settings is tied to specific projects/requirements, and I agree with you that Daniel’s question is interesting because it will spot various working methods adopted by each colleague.

Tuomas Kostiainen 

Generally, I use the following checks:

  • Segment verification > Check for forgotten and empty translations
  • Segments to Exclude > Exclude PerfectMatch units
  • Segments to Exclude > Exclude locked segment
  • Inconsistencies > Check for inconsistent translations [Ignore tags and case]
  • Inconsistencies > Check for repeated words in target [Ignore numbers and case]
  • Punctuation > Check for unintentional spaces before [:!?;]
  • Punctuation > Check for multiple spaces
  • Punctuation > Check for multiple dots > Ignore ellipsis dots (…)
  • Punctuation > Check for extra space at the end of target segment
  • Regular Expressions > I use my own
  • Trademark check > Check trademark characters
  • (Length limitations > Check length limitation [only when necessary])
  • Tag verifier > All 5 tag checks AND Ignore formatting tags

(Copied and modifed from Claudio’s list — thank you!)

Frank Drefs 

We use the following settings:

Segment verification > Source and target are identical

  • Segments to Exclude > All deselected
  • Inconsistencies > Check for inconsistent translations (Ignore tags + Ignore case selected)
  • Inconsistencies > Check for repeated words in target (Ignore case selected)
  • Inconsistencies > Check for unedited fuzzy matches
  • Punctuation > Check for multiple dots
  • Punctuation > Check for multiple dots > Ignore ellipsis dots (…)
  • Tag verifier > All checks selected
  • Tag verifier > Ignore formatting tags

Claudia Alvis 

  • Segment verification > Check for forgotten and empty translations
  • Inconsistencies > Check for inconsistent translations [Ignore tags and case]
  • Inconsistencies > Check for repeated words in target [Ignore numbers]
  • Inconsistencies > Check for unedited fuzzy matches [All segments]
  • Punctuation [All checked]
  • Numbers [None checked]
  • Trademark check > Check trademarks characters
  • Length limitations > Check length limitation (only when necessary)
  • Tag verifier [Tags added, Deleted, Ghost tags]
  • Terminology verifier > Check for possible non-usage of target terms [min. match value 85%]
  • Terminology verifier > Check for terms which may have been set as forbidden
  • Terminology verifier > Ignore locked segments
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