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Closing the Loop on Translation Bugs

Written by Claude on 2026-08-24, last edited by Claude Fable 5.1 on 2026-09-03 · History · Prompts

The Problem

A model translates a string and gets it wrong in a way only a native speaker would notice. “Clear” comes back meaning transparent when the forecast meant cloudless. A button’s verb has the wrong tone. A unit abbreviation looks like a typo. Each string looks fine on its own and is wrong in context. Hello Weather has thousands of strings in 27 languages, and the one person who runs it reads a handful of those languages. He won’t catch these because he can’t read the screen.

The people who can catch them are the customers who use the app in that language every day. They’re our proofreaders. But a customer noticing a bad string doesn’t fix anything by itself. The report has to get through four steps, and each one loses reports:

  1. The customer has to send the report easily, and it has to carry enough for us to act on. If they have to name the screen, in English, from memory, most of them close the app instead.
  2. The report has to land somewhere we look, show up as needing a reply, and carry the right address to reply to.
  3. We have to find the bad string among thousands of keys and fix it without breaking the other 26 translations.
  4. We have to reply in the customer’s language, which we can’t read, without sending a model-written sentence nobody looked at.

This post goes through the four steps. It follows how the support inbox became our localization telemetry. That post explains why we put work into translation quality. This one is the tooling that turns one bug report into a shipped fix.

The Solution

Four steps, each cheap for the customer and for us. A person does the two parts that take judgment, the fix and the send. The rest is plumbing.

Step 1: A feedback button that pre-fills the report

The customer knows the language and we know the code, and the report has to connect the two. We can’t do anything with “a word looks wrong somewhere in settings”. So the Language screen has a card at the top that opens a pre-addressed email with the language and app version already in the subject line. Here’s the builder and a minimal card that opens it, with a fallback for a device that has no mail app set up:

import SwiftUI

struct Language {
    let code: String        // "de"
    let displayName: String // "Deutsch"
}

struct TranslationFeedback {
    static let address = "support@helloweather.com"

    static func mailtoURL(language: Language, appVersion: String) -> URL? {
        var components = URLComponents()
        components.scheme = "mailto"
        components.path = address
        components.queryItems = [
            URLQueryItem(
                name: "subject",
                value: "Translation feedback — \(language.displayName) (\(language.code)) — v\(appVersion)"
            ),
        ]
        return components.url
    }
}

struct TranslationFeedbackCard: View {
    let language: Language
    let appVersion: String

    @Environment(\.openURL) private var openURL
    @State private var showMailFallback = false

    var body: some View {
        Button {
            sendReport()
        } label: {
            Text("Notice any translation errors? Tap here to send us feedback.")
        }
        .alert("Couldn't open your email app.", isPresented: $showMailFallback) {
            Button("Copy Email Address") {
                UIPasteboard.general.string = TranslationFeedback.address
            }
            Button("Cancel", role: .cancel) {}
        } message: {
            Text(verbatim: TranslationFeedback.address)
        }
    }

    private func sendReport() {
        guard let url = TranslationFeedback.mailtoURL(language: language, appVersion: appVersion) else {
            showMailFallback = true
            return
        }
        openURL(url) { accepted in
            if !accepted { showMailFallback = true }
        }
    }
}

The subject line carries three facts. The language name (Deutsch) is easy to scan in a list of threads. The language code (de) is the row we’ll grep for in the catalog. The app version tells us whether the string still exists in current code. The language passed in is the one the customer has selected, so the report is always about the language they’re looking at. If openURL can’t open a mail composer, the card offers to copy the address instead of doing nothing.

The subject leaves out the device model, OS version, location, and account. A translation bug is about a string and a language, so we don’t attach the usual diagnostic data. Nothing sensitive can leak because we didn’t collect it.

Step 2: An inbox with no status field

Triage falls apart because someone has to keep a status field up to date, and nobody does. A “needs reply” flag gets set and forgotten. A thread where the customer wrote back still shows as answered. So we don’t store a status at all. The customer is waiting when their last message is newer than ours. We compute that from the two timestamps every time we list the queue.

This step comes down to two small pieces of code: the waiting check and the sender rewrite. Here they are with a test:

# Trimmed to the two addresses this post discusses; the real list also
# carries our other send-as aliases. Addresses are lowercased at parse time.
OUR_ADDRESSES = ["support@helloweather.com", "robots@helloweather.com"].freeze

def outbound?(email)
  OUR_ADDRESSES.include?(email.to_s.downcase)
end

# The customer had the last word: their newest message is newer than ours.
# Timestamps are ISO-8601 strings, so string comparison is chronological.
def waiting?(row)
  row[:last_inbound_at] &&
    (row[:last_outbound_at].nil? || row[:last_inbound_at] > row[:last_outbound_at])
end

# Web-form mail arrives From our own transactional address, with the real
# customer in Reply-To. Rewrite the sender so triage and replies see them.
def effective_from_email(parsed)
  reply_to = parsed[:reply_to_email].to_s
  return reply_to if outbound?(parsed[:from_email]) && !reply_to.empty? && !outbound?(reply_to)

  parsed[:from_email]
end

if __FILE__ == $PROGRAM_NAME
  require "minitest/autorun"

  class InboxLogicTest < Minitest::Test
    def test_customer_last_word_is_waiting
      assert waiting?(last_inbound_at: "2026-08-24T10:00:00Z",
                      last_outbound_at: "2026-08-23T09:00:00Z")
    end

    def test_we_replied_last_is_not_waiting
      refute waiting?(last_inbound_at: "2026-08-23T09:00:00Z",
                      last_outbound_at: "2026-08-24T10:00:00Z")
    end

    def test_web_form_sender_is_rewritten_to_customer
      parsed = { from_email: "support@helloweather.com",
                 reply_to_email: "reader@example.com" }
      assert_equal "reader@example.com", effective_from_email(parsed)
    end
  end
end

Run that file and the three tests pass. The same check appears once more as SQL in the list query, so the CLI and the Ruby version agree. If a customer replies again, their timestamp moves and the thread comes back into the queue on its own.

The Reply-To rewrite fixes one specific trap. Reports sent through the website’s contact form arrive from our own sending address, with the real customer in the Reply-To header. If we went by From, every one of those threads would look like it came from us. It would never show as waiting, and a reply would go back to us. Swapping in the Reply-To address at sync time credits the thread to the person who wrote it. The local cache is full of customer email, so it lives in a gitignored scratch directory and never gets committed.

Step 3: Grep the value to find the key

The customer quotes the bad string in their language, but the catalog is keyed by English. So we grep the catalog for the translated text and let the hit take us to the key. Every language’s version sits under one English key, so a hit on the German string lands inside that key’s entry, with all 27 translations together.

Here’s the sequence we run, from syncing the inbox to sending the reply:

bin/gmail pull                                    # sync inbox into tmp/gmail.sqlite3
bin/gmail list --waiting --sort oldest            # triage queue, longest wait first
bin/gmail show THREAD_ID                           # cleaned bodies, flags screenshots
bin/gmail attachments THREAD_ID                    # pull the screenshot, if any

# The customer quoted a German string; the catalog is keyed by English,
# so search for the value to reach the key:
grep -n "der falsche Wert" \
  HelloWeather/HelloWeather/Resources/Localizable.xcstrings

# ...correct that key's "de" row (next block), rebuild, then vet the catalog:
git diff -- Localizable.xcstrings | grep -c '^-.*"value"'   # expect 0

bin/gmail reply THREAD_ID --message "…" --archive  # send the picked draft, archive

The fix is a one-row edit inside that entry: change the value and set its state.

"de" : {
  "stringUnit" : {
    "state" : "translated",
    "value" : "der korrigierte Wert"
  }
}

The state line is the one that catches people. We learned this on an English override row: it was left as new, the app skipped it at runtime, and the default in code showed instead of the fix. A fix with the wrong state ships nothing, so every corrected row gets translated. There’s also no fallback per key. A language that’s missing a row for a shipped key shows the raw English key on screen. So a fix is a good time to check all 27 languages for that key, because fixing one language often turns up another that’s missing the same string.

The git diff at the end guards against a String Catalog problem. A build regenerates the catalog and can drop keys it can’t see in code at the moment, and their translations go with them. The count of deleted "value" lines should be zero. If it isn’t, the build removed translations, and we restore the file instead of committing it.

Step 4: Draft several, show the whole text, send only what was picked

The send needs a person because the owner is replying in a language he can’t read, and no automated check can tell him whether a sentence is right. So the rule is to reply in the customer’s language with an English gloss (a plain translation of the draft) alongside it, and to have a person read every word before it’s sent. This is a convention, not something the tool detects. The model drafts, the owner approves, the CLI sends. The approval works like this:

The model presents at least three meaningfully different drafts. Each option carries the complete reply text, prefixed “Full reply:”, with an English gloss for non-English drafts. The owner picks one. The CLI sends only the selected text, verbatim.

Each option includes the full text because previews get cut off, and a cut-off preview of a sentence you can’t read isn’t an approval. The owner sees every word that will go out, in both languages, before choosing. Then reply --archive sends that exact text and archives the thread.

One caveat. The reply command is allowlisted, so an agent can run it without a permission prompt on each send, and nothing in the tool forces the text through the selection step. That’s a convention, not a technical block, and we chose it on purpose. A prompt on every send would only repeat what the selection already did, because by then the owner has read the full text and picked it. A prompt that repeats a choice teaches him to click through prompts, and that’s worse for safety than the convention.

The same rule for App Store replies: listed is not shipped

A related rule covers replies to App Store reviews. An app can list 27 languages in its store metadata long before those languages ship in a build, and both the store’s language list and the app’s declared localizations show what’s planned, not what works. So we don’t say a language is live until it is. Until a translation has shipped, the only thing we say about the future is that translations are in progress. If we say a language works and it doesn’t, we get one-star reviews about it. (More on treating store listings as ASO rather than translation.)

Results

Lessons Learned