Introduction

This article covers the Quality Assurance (QA) grammar checker. In XTM Workbench, a grammar error in a target segment is marked red.

To enable the QA grammar checker, which is defined in a specific QA profile:

Select Configuration → Settings → QA → (select a QA profile) → General → Language.
Select the Check grammar and style option (administrative privileges required!).

What is checked?

The QA grammar checker is a separate tool from our basic QA check, which is a spell-check. The QA grammar check is performed by the Language Tool and covers the following:

Extraneous apostrophes.
Style suggestion.
Grammar.
Possible word confusion.
Redundant phrases.
Letter case.
Colloquialism.
Compounding.
Gender neutrality.
Semantics.

Error descriptions from the Language Tool are not displayed to the Linguist in the XTM Cloud UI. However, you can see the relevant messages in the Dev Tools (for details, see How to use browser's developer tools (Dev Tools).

How does it work?

With a target segment active in XTM Workbench, open up Dev Tools and select Network → WS (WebSocket) → (select a websocket) → Messages/Response (to suit the Internet browser used). Now, create a grammar error in the target segment and then search for the biggest in-length message (in the Length column).

The message should contain more information about the error in question. It contains information such as “suggestions”, which provide a brief explanation about the error, hinting at a possible way to resolve the issue. In the case of the example analyzed here, the information provided would be:

"suggestions\":{\"2-g1\":{\"id\":\"2-g1\",\"qaClass\":\"grammar\",\"errorId\":\"ADJ_SUBST_ADJ_UNIFY\",\"shortMessage\":\"Niezgodne końcówki przymiotników i rzeczownika\",\"longMessage\":\"Przypuszczalnie brak zgodności form przypadków przymiotników i rzeczownika: takim kaseta magnetofonowa.

IMPORTANT!

As you might already have spotted in the example above, the entire response is always written in the target language for your project!

[...]
"MESSAGE\ndestination:/user/queue/main\ncontent-type:application/json\nsubscription:sub-0\nmessage-id:w3ko4am3-3489\ncontent-length:1808\n\n{\"type\":\"TRANSLATION_QUALITY_TRANS_UNIT\",\"payload\":{\"workbenchInstanceId\":\"6cd34afd9f494c25aecd1eebacee736b\",\"workbenchDocumentId\":\"299a0c3da38247ea96bf06bd04e35b7d_pl_PL\",\"requestId\":\"1702295616724\",\"transUnitId\":2,\"originalTarget\":{\"nodes\":[{\"type\":\"TEXT\",\"content\":\"Demo to sposób, w jaki muzyk przybliża pomysły swoje, w ustalonym formacie, takim kaseta magnetofonowa jak, płyta kompaktowa lub cyfrowe pliki audio, i w ten sposób przekazuje te pomysły wytwórniom płytowym, producentom płyt lub innym artystom.\",\"decorations\":[]}]},\"targetAfterQA\":{\"nodes\":[{\"type\":\"TEXT\",\"content\":\"Demo to sposób, w jaki muzyk przybliża pomysły swoje, w ustalonym formacie, \",\"decorations\":[]},{\"type\":\"TEXT\",\"content\":\"takim kaseta magnetofonowa\",\"decorations\":[{\"type\":\"TRANSLATION_QUALITY\",\"id\":\"2-g1\",\"qawarn\":false,\"misspell\":false,\"grammar\":true,\"values\":[]}]},{\"type\":\"TEXT\",\"content\":\" jak, płyta kompaktowa lub cyfrowe pliki audio, i w ten sposób przekazuje te pomysły wytwórniom płytowym, producentom płyt lub innym artystom.\",\"decorations\":[]}],\"suggestions\":{\"2-g1\":{\"id\":\"2-g1\",\"qaClass\":\"grammar\",\"errorId\":\"ADJ_SUBST_ADJ_UNIFY\",\"shortMessage\":\"Niezgodne końcówki przymiotników i rzeczownika\",\"longMessage\":\"Przypuszczalnie brak zgodności form przypadków przymiotników i rzeczownika: takim kaseta magnetofonowa.\",\"categoryId\":\"SYNTAX\",\"values\":[]}}},\"spellcheckFailed\":false,\"qaCheckFailed\":false,\"grammarErrors\":[{\"errorId\":\"ADJ_SUBST_ADJ_UNIFY\",\"categoryId\":\"SYNTAX\",\"shortMessage\":\"Niezgodne końcówki przymiotników i rzeczownika\",\"suggestions\":[],\"startPosition\":76,\"endPosition\":102}],\"translationQualityInfoTO\":{\"spellWarnings\":false,\"spellcheckFailed\":false,\"qaWarnings\":false,\"qaCheckFailed\":false,\"grammarWarnings\":true,\"globalWarnings\":[],\"globalWarningsCheckIds\":[]}}}\u0000"
[...]

Disabling grammar checking is the only way to suppress these error messages so that you do not receive them. All language grammar rules are stored in your XTM Cloud instance’s back-end, for each target language. These rules can be modified but this will affect all XTM customers, so we strongly recommend that you do not do so.

Good to know!

If you would like to know more about what the grammar checker covers, how it works and what grammar rules there are, contact the LanguageTool Support Team, since this is a separate tool that is simply integrated with XTM Cloud.