Stata Translation Workshop · Post-Workshop Survey
Drawn from the "concerns," "RSE role," and "other comments" free-text answers (9 respondents). Words are packed edge-to-edge into a circular cloud, upright or rotated a clean 90° only — no diagonal tilts. Concrete improvement asks are large and colorful; generic subject-matter words (testing, code, Stata…) stay small and gray — they're topic, not an ask.
Biggest ask: a reliable way to verify translated code is actually correct — 5 of 9 respondents raised this independently (code that "looks right but isn't," wanting line-by-line checks, no clear way to check accuracy on large packages, an unverifiable self-correction claim from Claude). Everything else was raised by 1–2 respondents each; treat the smaller phrases as individual ideas worth watching, not consensus. Color here is decorative (one hue per phrase, cycled) rather than meaningful — it's there to make each phrase easy to pick out, not to group them.
| Theme | Respondents | Representative quote |
|---|---|---|
| Verifying correctness | 5 | "Code that appears to be correct but is not – over confidence." |
| Flagging silent changes | 2 | "My code got simplified by Claude and it just put a comment saying # simplified… report back if it does any simplifications" |
| Understanding model limitations | 2 | "Understanding the limitations, and… where it may need support." |
| Line-by-line review | 1 | "I would want to check it line-by-line and do extensive testing." |
| Human-readable test scripts | 1 | "the test script … wasn't very user-friendly (used testthat package)" |
| Reporting discrepancies | 1 | "discrepancies between my STATA documentation and STATA code… did not flag this issue" |
| Verifying self-corrections | 1 | "Claude claimed to find an error in its translation and correct it; I was unable to verify this" |
| Idiomatic code structure | 1 | "Lack of elegance (e.g. using optimal structures/organisation/logic for each coding language)" |
| Standardized translation frameworks | 1 | "Designing systems/frameworks to standardise code translation processes." |
| Increasing rigour | 1 | "Increasing the rigour of what we do" |
| Drop-in support clinics | 1 | "Drop-in clinic (e.g. every month) where we could ask for advice" |
| Skill & plugin guidance | 1 | "Guidance on writing skills / plugin" |
| Incremental re-translation | 1 | "find a way to translate… new feature… without re-translating everything" |
| Generalize beyond Claude Code | 1 | "Generalisation to beyond Claude Code would be great" |
| User-guided pseudocode scoping | 1 | "pseudo-code writing step should… engage with the user to see if there is functionality… not needed" |
| Maintaining non-human code | 1 | "How can packages be updated/maintained/checked if not human-written?" |
| Environment & PATH setup | 1 | "Need to make sure to set up PATH variables correctly." |