Background
Alpha has been working as an LSP with some of the top car manufacturers for decades. In 2018, Alpha CRC Germany was asked to implement a workflow-controlled, systematic quality check of translated content in accordance with the SAE J2450 quality standard, with the addition of client-specific requirements. The aim of such review projects was to identify, correct, and evaluate translation errors in order to avert liability risks for the client’s passenger car brand.
Alpha’s solution fulfilled the following requirements:
- Online access and online review environment
- Password-protected user accounts
- Support of Trados Studio and bilingual files
- Automatic email notifications
- Project dashboard
- Sampling
- Different task owners – Project Manager, Reviewer, Validator, Translator, Arbiter
- Different permissions – Administrator, User, Guest
- Customizable workflow steps, e.g. Review and Rebuttal
- Customizable SAE-J2450 quality model
- Use of different quality models depending on content type
- Error annotation
- Selection of error category and severity
- Adding a comment against the issue being reported
- Ability to record multiple translation issues against the same segment, even overlapping ones
- Track changes
- Automatic terminology check against multiple termbases
- Ability for reviewer to enter overall feedback for the project, and not just at the segment level
- On-the-fly quality score calculation based on issues reported
- Quality dashboard, with analytics on
- Quality scores
- Languages
- Translation providers
- Error categories
- Severity distribution
- Volumes
- File formats
- Export quality reports in Excel format
- Export reviewed Trados Studio package and final files
Alpha had heard of a product called ContentQuo during various webinars and conference and believed that cooperation between Alpha and ContentQuo would be a good match for what our client was looking for – Alpha would provide the linguistic expertise via its reviewers and ContentQuo would provide the platform. Indeed, our joint proposal was well accepted by the client. Alpha and ContentQuo were invited to present their joint solution in person at the client’s headquarters in Germany, and were awarded the project.
On-boarding phase
The on-boarding phase lasted three months and helped all parties define the following items:
- User groups: Project Manager, Reviewer, Validator, Translator, Arbiter. Project Management would be shared between the client and Alpha in that each project could initially be set up by the client (files for evaluation, LQA model selection, languages, translation vendors), but taken over by the Alpha Project Manager once the review step (carried out by Alpha) was initiated.
- Workflow steps – Review, Validation, Rebuttal, and Arbitration: These represent all the steps configured in ContentQuo for this client and it meant that Alpha’s review step could be validated by a Project Manager, that the translator could disagree with the reviewer’s comments during a rebuttal step, and that one person could decide who was right as part of an arbitration step.
- LQA models: Three models were set up in ContentQuo based around the SAE-J2450 quality standard, with the addition of client-specific error criteria and quality thresholds.
- Content types: The client wanted to be able to obtain analytics on specific content types, although some shared a common LQA model. This was achieved with the Groups feature in ContentQuo.
- Security: It was important that all of the client’s work would take place on a physical and client-dedicated server, which was readily provisioned by ContentQuo through a trusted hosting partner in Germany and fully managed according to client’s GDPR requirements.
Certain client requirements were not supported in the then-current version of ContentQuo. However, thanks to the platform’s flexible architecture, the on-boarding phase could be augmented with a product customization step carried out by the ContentQuo engineering team. Some example custom features that have been developed specifically for this client (and now an integral part of ContentQuo): upload of various file formats as reference files, rollback of changes to text (so that rejected review comments are not found in the final SDLPPX file).