My First Month as a Language Moderator (LM) at the Utopian/DaVinci Translation Project - Working Practice and Future Goals

Approximately two months ago, I have decided to apply for the position of a Language Moderator (LM) of the Serbian Translation Team at the Utopian/DaVinci Translation Project, with vision to give my humble contribution to the open-source projects. Luckily for me, my application was reviewed positively, and I've been given an amazing opportunity and privilege to join this incredibly successful project.

After more than a month of being an LM, I have established some paradigms in my working practice that have been producing very good results so far. Having that said, I will try to share my working practice and know-how in this post, in hope that other Language Moderators will find some of them useful for their work.

Motivation for starting the Serbian Translation Team

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Serbian language belongs to the group of the South Slavic languages and as such differs greatly from West Germanic languages, where English language belongs. Because of that, translating English to Serbian is a very challenging work. I've encountered many websites and/or Android apps that were translated from their original English language to Serbian so badly, that very often I wasn't able to understand the meaning of the significant portion of the text.

This influenced greatly my motivation to contribute to the open-source projects, by providing high quality translations of these from English to my language.

However, to do that, I needed a team of people I'd be able to rely on, with enough of English language skills and with very good knowing of Serbian grammar (you'd be surprised how many native Serbian speakers fail to meet this condition!) to provide high quality translations I aim for.

Making a selection of people for the team

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The key for success of a potential team are of course the people. As the leader of a team, you should know their strengths, weaknesses and if possible - character, so you could be able to predict whether they'd be suitable addition for your team in terms of meeting your standards and expectations.

My strategy with this regard was simple - I decided to pick only those people for my team whose blogs I've been following for some time, and with whom I had a certain degree of interactions. In this way, I could evaluate their knowledge of both English and Serbian language (by analyzing their writing style in both languages), and I could get some insights of their characters by the way they interact with other people, and of course, with me.

After careful selection, my team was finally formed with the following people:

1. @alexs1320 (now second LM of the Serbian Translation Team)

2. @svemirac

3. @nikolanikola

4. @hidden84 (recent addition to the team)

Before Translators were added to the team, I had a brief with each one of them to make sure they understand the nature of the future work, and to make sure they understand what was expected of them and what is our mission.

Establishing working paradigms

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After getting familiar with the Utopian guidelines for LMs and Translators, my team and I were ready to start working on projects.

One of the first questions I got from members of my team was - how do I pick the project I will work on? Can you tell me what project should I start working on?

My answer was - NO :) And this is how the first rule of our team was formed:

1. Translators must pick projects on their own

Assigning projects to Translators is not a good idea, simply because each Translator knows what topic suits him/her the best. What is a piece of cake for one person to translate, for others might be a nightmare.

My advice for my Translators was to carefully go through a whole project (all of the strings, or at least through a good statistical sample of them if the project is too big) before choosing it for translating, and to pick a project only after they made sure that they'll be able to:

- Provide high quality translation, because they estimated that they have enough knowledge of the topic of the project;

- Complete started project before going for the next one.

In this way, each Translator has the freedom of choosing the project that suits his/her qualifications/interests on one hand (provided that given project wasn't already chosen by another Translator, to which I will come back later), and responsibility for that project on the other. Here responsibility means that, after picking a project on their own, situations like "this project has some really difficult strings, I will drop it and move to the next one" are absolutely unjustified and unacceptable. Although this might sound a bit harsh to some of you, there are couple of good reasons for why this should be avoided as a working practice.

First of all, it looks extremely unprofessional to leave unfinished work behind you. Second, you should ask yourself - if I don't translate those strings, who will? Of course that each project contains strings of various difficulty, and that you will encounter an extremely tricky strings within each project.

What a good Translator should do here in my opinion, is to try to clarify the meaning of the string by using all resources available. By this I mean that Translator should use the internet (Google up the unknown words/sentences, do the research), contact the project manager and ask for clarification/context of the string, and/or consult the LM about the challenging strings.

My Translators know that they can ask for my assistance any time, when it comes to translating difficult strings. Of course, this doesn't mean I will translate their strings for them, but that they will either leave several alternative translations for one string for me to pick the most appropriate one, or that they will message me with the issue behind particular string and offer their solutions and explanation why should that string be translated in that way. In this way, I have with my Translators a two-way constructive communication, where both sides provide suggestions, and then discuss whether they're good or not. Not rarely happens that I make a correction for a translation of the particular string, and Translator comes to me and says - I think you're wrong, it should be better to leave it like this, because of the following reasons.

2. Only one Translator can work on a project

I'm pretty sure that reasons for this are obvious, but it won't hurt to explain them anyway - each Translator has his/her own translating style. To maintain the consistency of that style throughout the whole project, only one person should work on a project.

3. A constructive feedback helps Translators improve their work

After a Translator has finished one part of the project, our job as LMs is to perform a quality check/proofreading of the translation. Through interaction with my LM colleagues, I have noticed that there are different approaches they take when it comes to proofreading. I will describe my personal approach here, that has worked pretty well in my team, more precisely, with the group of people I've chosen as Translators.

When I encounter a badly translated string while performing a proofreading, instead of downvoting it or doing the correction myself, I rather chose to leave a comment for the Translator next to the given string, so he could do corrections based on it. I approve the string only after all corrections have been made. Of course, each string I have to leave a comment for is counted as an error, and the final score is formed accordingly. Why bother leaving a comment then?

Because my aim is to encourage my Translators to constantly improve their translation work. By providing them feedback for each error they make, I have noticed that their work has rapidly improved, and that, over time, the number of strings I have to correct has decreased. Such approach saves my time on a long run as well, and most importantly, the final outcome is high quality of translation, which is, I believe, the ultimate goal all of us have.

Final remarks and future perspectives

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I firmly believe that client/final product should come first, which are in this particular case translations of open-source projects.

Our aim as the Serbian Translation Team is to deliver the best possible product (translation). A good team should be able to do that with the minimum amounts of stress, efforts and struggles. This is by no means easy to achieve, and requires people with certain qualities, moral values and work discipline. Moreover, maintaining a healthy, friendly working environment is one of the prerogatives of keeping the harmony within the team.

Each Translator must ensure consistency of his/her work, and most importantly, must bear a certain degree of responsibility, because such qualities of each individual translator contribute to the overall success of the team. My job as an LM is to maintain good relations within the team, to be always open for suggestions and constructive debates, and to be always willing to help them with challenging strings and motivate them when things are hard.

_{The key to success of a team are people, author Chris Potter, CC BY-SA 3.0}

I'm also devoted to the sustainable growth of our community. This is why the caution is needed if you are planning to hire a new Translator or LM. One team member with a ''problematic'' character or low level of commitment can destroy the efforts of the whole team and create a bad image. It's also important to avoid the competition and scale up the size of the team with the amount of work.

Last, but not least, with translations we provide for the open-source projects, we're representing the brand of Utopian/DaVinci, and the brand of Steemit as well. One irresponsible act and/or one low quality translation could potentially harm the image of the whole community.

At the end, I would like to say big Thank you to my amazing team, and to tell them to keep up with the good work. Also I would like to thank to the Community Moderators, Language Moderators and Translators of other teams who provided me with tips and tricks on how to get started, and of course, to the whole Utopian and DaVinci Management for giving such an unique opportunity to me and my team.

@scienceangel