Notify translator of untranslated content

Hi Dato team,

We have many different types of content in our app which need to be translated in many different languages.

It’s hard for our translators to keep track of what’s been added/updated in english, which is our source of truth, and needs to be translated.

It would be nice to have a place for them in the app to see all non-translated content in the locale they’ve been assigned to.

Best,
Matthias

@matthias one thing that you could do here is implement a plugin where you can “ask for translation”, which will send the id of the record to the selected translators? And maybe you can either set a flag in the selected translations, so that you can filter the records, or store the value somewhere else and offer the links to your translators (e.g. via email?). Not sure otherwise if we could do something directly in Dato?

1 Like

Hi @mat_jack1,

We built a plugin which adds a new “Translation” tab, which shows a list of all non-translated records for each record type + locale.

A few ideas which would have improved the DX a lot would be:

  • To have a _locales attribute on all records when fetching with the CMA, this way we’d know right away which locales have been added for the given record. Currently we can only see this information per field.
  • To be able to fetch all records from the CMA, since records already have a _locales attribute when fetched from the CMA. Currently we’ve had to fetch all record types independently.
  • Sometimes records fetched with the CMA don’t have the record level _locales attribute but they have an attribute per localized field, e.g.: _allTitleLocales. I haven’t found out why, and would love to know so that all my record types have the _locales one.

Thanks for your help,

Hello @matthias

On the second point, i think you meant “fetch all records on the CDA”, but i do agree with you that the first two bullet items would be nice additions.
The models that have the ‘_locales’ attribute available for query, are the ones that don’t have the “All locales required” attribute selected AND that have at least one localised field inside of them. Because if you have the “All locales required” and a localised field you can be sure that that all records inside that model have all the locales added to the project available.

Thank you for the feedback :slight_smile:

hey @matthias I have a doubt you are talking about the CDA all the way?

In case have you seen this documentation page: Content Delivery API - Localization - DatoCMS Docs ? It’s fairly recent, maybe you didn’t notice it?

Let me know as we tried to cover your concerns already with these changes, we might iterate once again on this if we get more feedback like yours. Thank you!