Ensuring Language Quality: Consistently on any language, any product, any project
In today's business environment, buyers of language services in any industry are under seemingly constant pressure, and ensuring the language quality of their localized products or translated content is certainly one area. Language quality is a must, but checks and balances need to be in place to ensure the required level of language quality is being measured and achieved.
Knowledge Center: Optimizing the Process of Language QA
This 57-minute webinar explores the current best practices in ensuring language quality (LQA). View webinar.
Consistent quality of translation is needed - regardless of who completed the translation, what the language is or the product or content. Quality should result in cost-efficiency, and not be a cost driver or an additional cost. In addition, constant alignment of client QA standards with industry standards needs to be ensured.
Sometimes language quality assurance infrastructure is in place, but sourcing it can be a headache. Scalability is always key - QA requirements vary over time and across languages; specific in-country presence and subject matter expertise is often hard to find or to book; strict deadlines and short turnaround times require careful planning and availability of QA staff.
Ensuring language quality needs a process focus. One size does not fit all here - a customized QA process is required while standardization of the process and metrics is often an ongoing challenge. Pre-emptive measures are normally needed in addition to QA and subsequent corrective measures, and the objective should always be to analyze the root cause of any quality issues identified.
Moravia Language Quality Services (MLQS)
Key MLQS Service Characteristics
- Performing language QA according to defined (clients‘ or industry) standards and providing feedback to clients
- Defining new, or reviewing existing, QA processes and metrics and suggesting improvements and standardization
- Provided in over 30 European and Asian languages
- A broad range of subject matter expertise
- Services independent of our translation services
- QA resources located in-country, but a fully centralized multilingual delivery is provided to clients
- Common issues recorded are flagged and corrected for all languages
MLQS services are designed to give clients confidence in the language quality of translated content and provide an independent audit or check of the quality against predefined - industry or client-defined - standards. These standalone services are provided as independent linguistic quality assurance checks to ensure standardized quality control for translated content regardless of who provided the original translation.
As part of this solution, Moravia's separate MLQS team performs quality assurance (QA) checks on the translated content and reports on how the translated content meets established quality metrics. In addition, working closely with clients, Moravia's MLQS team helps to develop new, or analyze existing, language QA procedures that are most appropriate for client-specific needs.
With senior linguistic experts onboard, Moravia's MLQS team is also able to analyze the root cause of quality issues identified in previously-released products and to suggest a customized QA process for clients.
Some companies outsource language quality assurance because of the high volume, others because their requirements are not ongoing and hence do not call for in-house staff. Some companies opt for a mixed model. In all scenarios, our independent MLQS team gives our clients the confidence they can control linguistic quality effectively and as a managed process.
A Wide Range of QA Types and Materials
Linguistic quality assurance checks are normally conducted on a number of standard product components. In addition, depending on the specific requirements of clients and their projects, Moravia's MLQS teams provide special types of language QA checks or review components of different types.
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Typical product components for linguistic quality assurance |
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Special types of language QA checks |
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Specific types of components and QA checks |
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Communication Flow
MLQS services are supported by our Moravia Linguistic Services (MLS) Group, which provides the centralized backbone linguistic support in areas such a QA methodology, training of MLQS reviewers, priorities of terminology resources, or any other kind of linguistic-related issues, and which oversees the quality of the QA feedback so that it complies with defined standards.
Our MLQS reviewers located in-country perform QA within the given timeframe and in compliance with the standards. MLQS project teams are headed by a dedicated Project Manager, who acts as the single communication point for clients, centralized MLS resources and the MLQS reviewers in terms of MLQS planning, and is responsible for providing all references and details needed for appropriate QA performance.
Assessing the Language Quality
The output from a QA assessment is normally a report which typically contains the following categories of errors:
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Error Categories |
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The goal of such a report is to provide an independent feedback on how the quality of the reviewed text corresponds with defined metrics. The report normally contains information such as:
- Overall evaluation (Pass to Fail)
- Categorization of errors according to metrics
- Metrics used - number errors allowed per categories
- List of errors identified with comments
The current evolving translation environment increasingly features more advanced approaches to content recycling between versions and between individual components, the use of various Machine Translation methodologies and types of subsequent post-editing as well as the use of new translation tools and systems. The MLQS integrated approach helps to ensure clients' products and documentation reach their end-customers at the same level of linguistic quality regardless of the target language or complexity of the translation process.
As an independent provider of language quality audits, MLQS provides clients with:
- Central management of multilingual QA services and processes
- Efficient and consistent implementation of customer-specific requirements and feedback across all languages
- In-country MLQS reviewers who simplify the definition and addressing of language and cultural differences and specifics
- Focus on efficiency and process improvements
To find out how our Language Quality Services could help you manage the quality assurance process on your translation projects, please complete the Request for Information form and we will get back to you shortly, or see other options for contacting us.