21 March 2022
Creating an ideal QA process
Quality assurance is key to marketing, especially with translated content. This is especially important in markets where words have particular weight, such as luxury products or games. Badly translated text – seen on ads such as Parker Pens’ “It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant” and “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From the Grave” – can have a real effect on both sales and brand perception.
Ensuring high linguistic quality in translation not only reduces the chances of mis-translation, it helps to make products more appealing to the target audience. Although a rough translation may get the idea of your product across, the use of the wrong tone or stilted language can reduce the perceived quality of your end product – and your reputation.
Localization ensures an increased appeal amongst the target audience. Localization requirements vary wildly across the globe. Russian luxury shoppers, for example, desire imported goods from specific countries, favouring Italy and France. Brazilian shoppers, on the other hand, require a local, Brazilian flavour to their products, reflecting the strong national identity that is a key feature of the country.
One key aspect to retaining linguistic quality in translation is a high-quality, involved team at all levels of the translation process from start to finish. By providing feedback throughout, team members know exactly how they are doing – and in which areas they need to improve.
By keeping a centrally located in-house language team who are skilled at operating on all platforms and mobile devices, constant improvement is made far simpler and feedback can be provided and acted on instantly. Having a roster of in-house staff who are skilled in various languages means that there is an increased number of qualified staff for backup requirements.
Each new member should be hired against a specific criteria, following a process that is clarified between translator and client. They should be trained on each client’s specific needs for their project. By giving direct team access to the client at all times, the client is able to shape the translation process to their liking, ensuring satisfaction with the final product.
A steering team should be in place from the start, ensuring that knowledge is acquired wholly and completely and is shared in a timely manner, following milestones that have been agreed with the client. This process should be handled sensitively, ensuring that it motivates and is sensitive towards any incumbent client LQA specialist staff. Positive relationships should be nurtured throughout with the aim of establishing high-quality, good-value outcomes at the translation stage.
When a client has direct, secure access to the production and business management system for the project, they can easily analyse results and team progress day by day, keeping transparency at the forefront of the Linguistic Quality Assurance process. This means that they have an overview of financial data, reducing the costs of the LQA within a short time frame without a reduction in quality.
By dividing the translation department into teams, each overseen by a lead, the involvement of the overall team coordinator is reduced. Each dedicated lead oversees their individual assigned project, ensuring that tasks are delegated correctly.
Quality Assessment should be carried out throughout the process of translation and localization, not just at the end stage of a project. This allows clients and staff to consistently maintain a high quality throughout, catching issues while they are minor and before major problems have a chance to develop.
Partnership with clients is very important to retaining quality, with a need for clear and open communication throughout. Both staff and client should be on the same page, with their mutual goal being successful deployment of products in the correct market, with the relationship continuing through to the project’s execution.
By making the stages of the project tasks clear to both client and team – itemising them both on the project plan and the schedule – the quality of the deliverable product is measured and agreed upon with clients throughout the process.
Progress should be measured against a client-defined set of KPIs, published and analysed on a regular basis both on an individual and team level. Skill gaps should be identified throughout as areas for improvement. This allows individuals and teams to work to the best of their ability and receive targeted training to improve their performance. By combining these with metrics and surveys throughout the translation process, the impact and quality of the translation can be measured.
Resource quality is tracked by measuring the successes and failures of the output material as well as running feedback loops and organising and monitoring corrective actions. Quality check steps are taken at each stage of the task to ensure that deliverables are of a high standard, whether they are at a linguistic or functional stage. Ensuring that the functional stage is correct is crucial; functional mis-translations could cause big issues in areas such as medical manuals or software instructions.
Client feedback is key to monitoring and measuring the quality of translation. By allowing clients to engage independent reviewers or SMEs, clients are free to verify that the output is of the high quality expected. Any feedback should be distributed to all linguists on the project, allowing them to implement corrections as necessary as well as updating reference material, TdBs and TMs. As the linguists are continuously analysing and discussing client feedback, they learn from any mistakes, ensuring that the material fully fulfils the client’s brief.
Because Alpha require translation quality to be measurable, several tests are run throughout the process. These combine a practical checking process with an analytical one, using real data to gather insights into issues faced during the process. By using three elements to score each translation – adequacy, fluency and typology – we can analyse whether the original meaning has been fully translated, whether the text flows and whether there are any errors, misunderstandings or awkward language.
The final stages of Quality Assurance should generate scorecards and quality reports, feeding into staff KPI reports. This allows for monitoring of performance on individual and multiple languages both for single delivery and over a defined period. A final update of referenceable material should then be performed, ensuring that the translation team are prepared for future projects. For websites or online projects, the Quality Assurance process should be adapted to an Online QA process (OQA) performed on the staging web server prior to online release.
The Quality Assurance process should always be adapted and fine-tuned to suit the content and the clients’ workflow, production cycles and individual preferences.
The team that is responsible for handling the final Quality Assurance is the gatekeeper of the Quality Assurance process, but that doesn’t mean that responsibility should rest solely with them. Every team should be signing off on their portion of work, ensuring that it is completed to the highest possible standard. By keeping tight control of internal teams and external resources, quality can be maintained, and with a stable project management team, quality deliveries over the lifespan of a project can be ensured and long-term consistency can be provided for the customer.
Translators should be carefully selected to match client requirements, based on their subject matter expertise, knowledge of customer preferences and the reference assets (including TMs, TdBs, Style Guides and previously translated assets). They should take full advantage of their support material to ensure that source material is translated completely and accurately.
Reviewers, following on from translators, should review the entirety of each asset, ensuring that the translated content is naturalized and localized – reading as if it originated from a native speaker. Systematic feedback should then be sent to translators, correcting their errors and allowing them to learn from their mistakes.
Clients should be involved in the early reviews for any ongoing projects with their feedback being circulated throughout the production team, ensuring that they are satisfied with all stages of the translation and the final product.
The Quality Assurance team should perform the final quality checks and material sign-offs, ensuring that translated content, whether from an in-house or external source, is fully compliant with internal quality guidelines and the set list of requirements previously established with the client. From this they compile scorecards for other members of the team, listing any errors encountered and providing categorization for the errors. These allow them to produce Quality and KPI Reports. External translations should be checked throughout the writing process, typically at 10%, 30%, 75% and at completion, ensuring that the final translation is of optimum quality.
Alpha’s linguistic quality assurance process ensures the most accurate translation, retaining the tone and message of the translated content, not just translating the words. By adapting texts for a more local market, their relevance is increased, improving product and brand recognition. Alpha offers global coverage with offices in many major client locations. We can offer direct, in-country contact from 18 offices in the USA, Asia and Europe.
