How do I review and approve translations?

Review in Better i18n is enforced by roles and status, not by a queue. There is no Review tab and no approval workflow to switch on — which means the setup is smaller than you might expect, and it works the moment you assign roles.

How it actually works #

1. Machine output, imports and syncs land as draft — unvouched-for
2. A value someone types is saved as approved — editing it is vouching for it
3. Publishing requires the approve permission, so the act of shipping is the act of approving

That third point is the whole mechanism: a person without approve rights can translate all day and cannot put it live.

Roles are the control #

So the review workflow is: invite the person doing the translating as translator, and the person accountable for the language as reviewer. The translator's work accumulates and waits; the reviewer is the only one who can release it.

One detail worth knowing: editing a source-language value also requires approve rights. Source text is what every other language is derived from, so a translator cannot quietly change the thing everyone else is translating.

Doing a review pass #

1. Open Translations
2. Filter to draft — that is your queue
3. Read the source next to the translation
4. Fix what is wrong, which saves it as approved, or leave it and move on
5. Publish when the language is where you want it

There is no Approve button separate from this: a value you correct is approved by that act, and a value you are happy with becomes approved when you publish it.

Leaving a trail #

• Notes on a value record why it reads the way it does — the closest thing to a review comment, and it stays attached to the value rather than living in a thread
• History on every value records the origin of each change (manual edit, AI, bulk update, import, note), so "who changed this and where did it come from" is answerable afterwards

What does not exist #

Being explicit, since all four are reasonable things to look for:

• No "require review before publish" setting. The permission model is the gate. If you need review enforced, do not give people approve rights.
• No reject-with-comment. Correcting the value is the rejection; the note field is where the reasoning goes.
• No per-language reviewer assignment and no review notifications. Who reviews which language is a decision your team holds, not a field the platform stores.
• No review metrics — no approval-time or rejection-rate reporting.

If you want a queue with age and assignment, the honest answer today is that the draft filter plus roles gets you the enforcement, and the tracking lives wherever your team already tracks work.