Hi! My name is Gabriel, and I've been an EN > ES translator on Gengo for more than two years now.
On my experience, the platform always had some occasional bug here and there, nothing too disruptive, but lately, constant bugs, both old and new, are really beginning to hamper my workflow. I'll describe some of them to see if there is something wrong on my end (same experience on Chrome and a clean install of Firefox) or if this is happening to more people:
Deceptive "Collection unavailable" popups
Let's say you try to grab a collection: upon hitting "Start translating" you get a nondescript "Something went wrong" error popup (remember this character, as it will be the villain on the 2nd act!), upon closing it, you try again, and it says that the collection is unavailable. Ok, someone else grabbed it, what can you do, right? better luck next time... but, then you go back to your dashboard and see the collection has actually been assigned to you.
Fortunately, I know to always check for that in cases like this, otherwise I may just go "Oh, well", close the tab thinking someone simply beat me to it and then the collection would just expire, with me risking penalization for not working on a collection I didn't know I was assigned to on the first place because the platform specifically told me so.
This used to happen very, very rarely, but now it happens all the time (for me at least). Like half the time I take a collection or even more!
(Believe it or not, I grabbed that one. As a matter of fact, this just happened while I was composing this very same post. I was pretty confident that I would find this collection on my "Incomplete" folder when I took the screenshot, since it happens all the time)
"Something went wrong" popups everywhere
When opening collections, when accepting them (as previously mentioned), when loading more jobs on big collections, when submitting collections (which, similar to my previous point, makes it look like it wasn't submitted, although it actually was), out of nowhere when you are just typing, etc. It doesn't always happen, but lately it happens a lot, and it can get quite disruptive.
(the bane of my existence, basically)
Sometimes "Could not save" errors (the upper black bar thingie) are pretty constant too
This can lead to issues and get very problematic on collections with a lot of short jobs. You have to be attentive and click on "Retry" or just manually force the job into saving again (I usually do a quick space-backspace on the job to make it re-trigger the save process so I don't have to reach for the mouse) as this usually triggers when you are already on the following job of the collection, or you risk leaving an "unidentified" non-saved job out there.
Since this gets its accompanying "Something went wrong" popup, I tend to just hit intro to get over with it and keep working (as most of this popups are meaningless anyways) and I don't immediately notice the "Your recent changes may not have been saved" warning (or maybe my brain ends up filtering it out as background noise because of seeing it too much).
This can lead to "missing" unsaved jobs that you can't pinpoint (since they don't look any different from a saved job) unless you refresh the page to see which ones come up empty (thus effectively losing your efforts on those jobs). This also can get very tedious on big jobs with a lot of collections. Yeah, theoretically, you have the "Empty" filter, but it seems to get stuck loading forever on big collections (or maybe the empty job on the server side conflicts with the non-empty text box on your browser on your side, who knows). Besides, there is also the problem of jobs that only got saved halfway through, so you couldn't filter them like that anyways.
A couple of days ago I suffered this on a +200 jobs collection, where the completion bar showed I was missing just one job, although I had translated all of them. I didn't think at first to simply refresh the page (and I wanted to try solving it myself before contacting support), so locating that unruly job was quite tedious, to be honest (plus I found a couple more which only got "half saved").
If I may, I'd suggest making save errors to automatically trigger a retry on the affected job without user prompt, or that saved jobs at least give some visual cue that they are indeed successfully saved, like displaying a check mark or something (probably easier to implement than automatic retry, although it still wouldn't warn about jobs only saved halfway through). Or maybe some way to tell the collection to just try saving all unsaved jobs on the collection.
And please, don't get me wrong, I love Gengo! But it wasn't this buggy until recently, so it pains me to see it like this.
Sorry for the textwall and have a nice day!
12 comments
Hi Gabriel, I just wanted to say that it's not a problem on your end. This is happening in my language pair as well (EN-IT). At first I thought it was a problem with larger collections, but now it seems to happen no matter what. As you say, it's quite disruptive and annoying, and I sure hope they are working to fix it :-)
I fully agree with all points, the recent Workbench experience has been less than ideal, to put it lightly. The other day I wasted 30 minutes of my life trying to figure out why it wouldn't register 4 segments as complete; turns out there seems to be yet another bug with jobs that are split into multiple segments (by that I mean "one white box with multiple parts") where the translations are sometimes not registered.
Hi, Gabriel.
I have just experienced all the issues you mentioned in your post. Most infuriating was realising that the submitted translation had not fully saved all my work and at least one segment still displayed the source text. Also, several misspelled words that weren't such. Sigh.
@Katrina Paterson,
Thank you for responding! Could you please also comment on the expectations that we should have once we report bugs to support? Sadly, it has been my impression that once something breaks, it rarely gets fixed.
I currently have two active support requests that I opened months (if not years) ago. One of the bugs I reported results in me being unable to see comments on reviews that I receive, so every time a reviewer marks an error in one of my translations or makes a suggestion, I have to ask Support to get me screenshots, which should not be their job (even casting privacy considerations aside). In all this time, I did not receive any indication of when the underlying problem will be fixed and whether anyone is actually looking into fixing it. My other open ticket has to do with the way comments display alongside jobs with multiple segments - a bug that affects jobs by one of Gengo's major clients (the one that puts images in comments), essentially putting translators before a choice between wasting a lot of time scrolling and ignoring potentially important information. In both cases, Support has confirmed that the problems are not on my end and there is no workaround I can use (like using a different browser). Please let me know if you would like me to refer you to the specific support cases.
P.S. Does anyone remember file previews? There was a time when one could scroll through entire multi-page documents, spreadsheets, and presentations before accepting the job; then, one day, it stopped working and never came back...
The whole situation seems concerning to me – there are major problems and bugs that affect translators' workflow for months, which in turn affect clients (like longer job turnout times due to dealing with errors, segments that save only partially because of "could not save"), and it seems like there's still not much improvement. It reminds me of cases in which companies' whole departments get shelved after acquisition, so there's really no one to work on fixing problems. Anyway, I really hope that's not the case here and everything will be fixed eventually someday.
All of the abovementioned has happened to me (EN-RU), and I would also like to notice, with regards to the first described issue, that you cannot pick up any collection once you have an unfinished job - and that was the case. I tried to grab one recently, saw "collection unavailable" status, closed the tab... and then found out that it had been assigned to me when it was only two minutes before the expiration! And I was not able to take new incoming jobs just not knowing I was already "working" on one. Such a pity.
I also noticed much of the above in English to German.
Hi Gabriel, no need to apologise for the text wall - we appreciate the level of detail that you’ve gone into. We’re aware that there have been some issues lately with bugs on the system, and our team is currently looking into this.
Although you’re always more than welcome to share your thoughts with the community, we can’t stress enough the importance of reporting these issues to the Support team at support@gengo.com, since if you do this then not only will they be able to look into your specific situation, but they will also have a better idea of the scope of the issue and therefore be much better able to track it. We’d really urge the same from everyone else who has posted here, because that way we can help to create a comprehensive record of the issue. In the meantime, we do very much appreciate everybody’s comments and your suggestions for improvements, and we’ll be sure to pass these along so that the relevant teams can look into them when resources allow.
We hope this helps, but please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions or feedback. We hope you have a nice day too :)
Hello Lidia, thank you for sharing your concerns with us about the two active support requests that you mentioned. I’ve brought these up again with the Support team and I am currently waiting for a response from them - once I have this, I’ll be sure to update you. Regarding your third question about the file preview option - this is actually not a feature that we offer any more, our rationale behind this being that the majority of translators pick up file jobs relatively quickly (before then deciding whether to continue working on the job or to decline it), and so the option to read through the whole file before accepting was not necessarily being used very widely.
To Astolat and everybody else that has shared their experiences with bugs on this thread - as many of you know, the current bug issue that we posted about on the translator dashboard is still under investigation but the Engineering team expects to be able to release an update soon and we are hopeful that this will help to solve the problem.
We do appreciate all of your patience while we wait for resources to be allocated to solving the bug issue, and In the meantime, we would like to emphasise, as we have done here and on other threads, that logging a ticket with Support every time you experience an issue will help us to make progress in this regard, as well as creating a record of system issues that will help in diagnosing the scope of the overall problem. We hope that this clears some of your doubts, but please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any further questions.
I just realized that it's been a while since I experimented any of the issues mentioned here, the experience has been quite smooth lately...
Good job! :D
Hello again, @Lidia, I’m just following up on the last message that I left here. As you'll have seen, the Support team has now contacted you directly to provide further guidance about each of the two queries that you mentioned - the issues with viewing comments in GoCheck reviews, and the long scrolling that comes as a result of the way that the comments display alongside jobs with multiple segments. I’d like to thank you again for raising these, and to encourage everyone else to reach out to Support or to myself about any issues that they may be having, since your feedback is always valuable. Keep it coming!
Hello Gabriel, we're happy to hear that you're enjoying the improved experience! Thanks for taking the time to comment :)