Translation suggestions

Pootle has the ability to optionally allow users to provide suggestions that need to be reviewed before they are accepted into the real translation files. Who is allowed to do what, is determined by the configuration of permissions for the project or the server.

Users with rights for making suggestions will see a “Suggest” button next to “Submit”. Making a suggestions is as easy as clicking the button -- hey, did you expect more steps involved?

To view suggestions made by others, it is necessary to select the “View Suggestions” option from the editing functions -- not very trivial, though. Since Pootle version 1.2 this task is straightforward, as suggestions will be shown directly next to the translation box. If available, the suggester's username will be displayed.

In order to review suggestions, users must have reviewing privileges. There are two ways for reviewing suggestions: going through all of them, or reviewing while translating (available since 1.2).

To go through all of them, the reviewer must click on “Review Suggestions” from the edition functions of the project. This would guide her/him through all the suggestions available for the current view.

The second method is straightforward, since suggestions are shown throughout the translation process. Additionally, buttons for accepting and rejecting the suggestions are displayed.

While reviewing a suggestion, a coloured difference between the current translation and the suggestion is displayed. If available, the username is provided of the user that gave the suggestion.

In current Pootle versions, accepting and rejecting suggestions is only available when the “Review Suggestions” action is taken and normal input buttons are displayed to accept and reject suggestions. Accepting and rejecting suggestions have effect on single suggestions, so accepting a suggestions won't reject the remaining ones.
Since Pootle 1.2 this behaviour has changed: accepting a suggestion for a specific unit rejects all the remaining suggestions. Also, instead of the input buttons two icons are displayed -- a tick approves, and a cross discards. Added to this, no page reload is needed since all the requests are done using AJAX methods.

The PO format does not specify a way for storing suggestions in the files. In PO based projects, we therefore store suggestions in .pending files next to the real PO files. Location comments (#: comments) are used to match suggestions with the translations. If your PO file does not have #: comments, or if these comments are not unique for each translation unit, the matching won't work. This can be addressed by adding any unique #: comments to the POT file and updating translations to the new POT file.

Note that this way of matching might also affect a team after upgrading to new templates if the location comments changed in the POT file. Therefore suggestions should ideally be reviewed before upgrading to newer templates.

In XLIFF based projects, suggestions are stored in alt-trans tags. Note that if files are uploaded with the “overwrite” choice, these suggestions in the version on the server will be lost, or replaced with whatever existed in the uploaded file.