Email notifications on newly added strings lead contributors to provide incomplete translations

When new strings are added to a project, people who previously contributed to it receive an email notification. In the email, there is a link that says “XX new strings for translation”, and when you click the link, you are taken directly to the Crowdin website where it shows you these new strings.

This sounds like a good system, but it’s not! Because users are only shown the new strings, they think that translating those will complete the translation. But any older strings which are also untranslated will be overlooked by the users and therefore not translated. Because of this, many of the languages in my projects have incomplete translations, and the design/wording of Crowdin’s notification emails ensures that it stays that way. Every time I add new strings to a project, users translate the new strings, but they almost never translate the old ones because they don’t even get to see them.

This is not an isolated incident. This has happened repeatedly over the past several months, in multiple projects, and with multiple different users. They all suffer from the same problem. The poorly designed notification emails are the reason why many translations in my projects stay incomplete. This is so frustrating. Please, could someone change this?!

Hello @EmilJunker
Interesting idea I must admit. So, actually, you would like users to receive a notification like “some stings are remaining untranslated”? Probably would be technically hard to realize.

Plus some content may remain not translated for a while, as hidden stings or just “left for later”. Receiving let’s say weekly\daily email like “Hi there, in the project are still something not translated” may be quite disturbing for users.

Actually, it should be solved pretty easy. If you use community, just message them to open in editor all stings and use chronological filter, so oldest ones are displayed at the first.

Plus, I use tasks for prioritizing the translations. Quite helpful tool.
One my teammate likes to message users in Crowdin and say from where they should start.

Anyway, all ideas are passing strict review before someone from team adds them as a feature-request task in internal system (at least I assume that the process should be like that). Add this request here, in case there would be some votes/likes for it, it should be reviewed:

The solution to this problem is very simple. The notification email contains multiple links. Currently, the first link takes the user directly to the translation editor and applies a filter, so the user only sees the newly added strings. The second link takes the user to the overview page of the Crowdin project where they get a much better picture of the available languages and their translation status. But because most users just blindly click on the first link, they always only translate the newly added strings.

To fix this problem, the order of the links in the email should be swapped. There should be a prominent link at the top that takes you to the project page, and a smaller link further below that only shows you the new strings.

Maybe it would be better to have an ability to send some customs emails to your project members. But I don’t think in may be realized in regular version, probably in Crowdin Enterprise only (you create a separate user account there for each organization you’re a member of). In regular I wouldn’t like to receive 6 different emails type from 6 different projects I’m the member of :sweat_smile:

From my point of view in terms of user experience current emails are fine. You just see the title and click the very fist link inside, and you are in the project and translate needed files. And as @Petros_Kastello said, you always have other communication ways except the emails.

I don’t think someone would change the order of links, but I’ve seen here in community a manager’s reply like “in case feature request gets tons of +, it is reviewed and added into product” so I guess you can give a try submitting one.