Best Practices for Using the Smartling Issues Feature

Charlotte Creaser

Customer Success Manager Smartling

Having an Open Dialogue With Your Linguists

There will always be times that you would like to give your linguists feedback or ask questions on their translations. Perhaps their translation doesn’t align with your brand, it doesn’t fit the output space as well as it should, or maybe it’s simply a poor translation and should be changed.

In Smartling, you can open up a translation issue to give feedback or comments to the linguist on a specific string.

Likewise, there will be times when your linguists need to raise questions on the source strings. Maybe it’s the first time they’ve seen a certain term and need clarification or want to check whether a term is company-specific and should not be translated at all.

In such a case, your linguist can open up a source issue directly in the CAT Tool to raise their question or comment on a string to receive feedback before completing the translation.

Smartling Issues are stored and visible directly in the platform to keep track of these valuable conversations and highlight any areas for improvement. It might even prompt you to update your Glossary or provide clearer brand guidelines in your Style Guide to keep translation quality at its best.

The Issues Report

Want to take a look at trends in the issues being raised in your account? You can access all issues in one place by accessing the Issues Report on the top panel in your dashboard under reports.

The Issues Report contains a list of all issues across all jobs the user has access to. Use the filter and search panel on the left to find specific Issues and manage all of your linguist contact in one place.

This report can be useful for finding common questions related to your content or common revisions needed for your translations. You could maybe spot patterns and provide additional support for your translators to save time in the future.

Tips & Tricks for Managing Issues

First things first – Make sure that your Global Notification Preferences are enabled to receive notifications when an issue is opened, commented on, and closed.
Respond ASAP: There’s a good chance your linguist can’t proceed without resolution. For example, placeholders might be incorrect, or it’s possible the string shouldn’t be translated at all or needs to be recaptured.
Close Issues: We always recommend that the person who opens the issue should be responsible for closing it. However, you should agree on the preferred practice with your translation provider in advance so everyone understands their responsibilities. Make sure you’re satisfied with the resolution and that your linguist has fully understood your comments, and then close the issue so that you can stay focused on any other open issues.
Use the ‘Answered’ checkbox as a way of tracking via the Issues report the ones you have responded to, if they remain open until the person who opened it can close it out.
Add Watchers: Add someone to the issue who should have visibility and can contribute to the thread. This does not have to be a user in Smartling; any email will work.
Try our Slack plugin! If you use Slack, our plugin pushes issues to a Slack channel and enables you to take action on them (comment, close, mark answered) directly from Slack.