From Occasional Quality Checks to Collaborative Quality Assurance

"A Slippery Slope: Measuring the Quality of Extra Virgin Olive Oil and Translation" - thats's how Don DePalma put it in a nutshell on the Common Sense Advisory Website. Here's our point of view to this important issue:

Klaus Fleischmann
on quality management

In the last decade, translation tools have not only made impressive progress in terms of user friendliness, productivity and automation, but have also incorporated a wide array of quality control tools, making it easier to detect and correct linguistic errors in the translated text. This has been extended into reviewer tools and portals, such as our own globalReview product, which allows in-country (or other) reviewers to check and approve translations online.

However, for a “holistic” company-wide approach, we need to look beyond simple quality checks to a strategic level and implement a real quality assurance process in terms of error prevention, quality evaluation, and ultimately quality improvement. While quality control is a post-process endeavor, quality assurance starts well before the actual translation with aspects like clean source texts, solid terminology, project preparation and intelligent query management during the translation process. And it continues well after the translation to provide quality tracking, process improvement and an objective quality assessment. All of these processes involve stakeholders outside the core translation process: authors, clients, in-country reviewers and others.

Incorporating these stakeholders and “fringe” processes into the highly industrialized translation production process, however, is easier said than done. For instance, Common Sense Advisory recently found that in-country reviews “…are notorious for causing delays and frustrations for all parties involved. “

I believe that we can do two things to improve this review process, apart of course from technological assistance by simple online tools or in-layout reviewing:

1) Shift the focus of reviewers from “reviewing” to “assessing” the quality of the translations. Rather than painstakingly reviewing every segment, they can review predefined samples and assess them. The error scores will be calculated and, most importantly, continuously tracked. This gives us business intelligence to find out which languages, vendors, processes, or projects we need to work on to improve quality. It also makes the whole process much more objective and less emotional.

2) From a process point of view, we need to make it clear to reviewers that they are not necessarily responsible for getting the text ready and fit to publish. They assess quality, and if corrective measures have to be taken, they will be taken: by the translators who are ultimately responsible for the final text. The reviewers help us to assure the text meets the market conditions and general expectations and to develop an ever-improving product over time.

 

Holistic, collaborative, quality-driven

Sounds like a rather complex project? Not necessarily, if you, as a precondition, integrate all stakeholders and smoothen processes. Thus, you avoid frustrations, delays, or, even worse, total blockage. Furthermore, we recommend implementing a collaborative language quality process by means of a web-based, centralized platform. The back-end of this platform needs to be integrated into CAT tools, while the front-end has to be much more “collaborative” and communication-oriented. The latter enables and motivates non-linguists to participate in the process, making it much faster and much more “strategic”. So, say good-bye to the days of painstaking reviews and hello to terminology processes for the pre-translation, query management during the translation and quality assessment for the post-translation phase.

Integrating these three working areas in one collaborative place creates a healthful boost for the overall language quality and following significant benefits:

• It is very easy and highly efficient to manage these very different workflows with one unique task-based platform.
• Collaboration and community features make it a lot easier to keep track of tasks and open issues. The communication-driven process also connects all stakeholders in one team and thus avoids individual “black boxes” criticizing each other.
•  The quality assessment platform enables the stakeholders both to give input and to actively track performance. Due to this tracking, the stakeholders are bound to witness improvements on the overall process. Objective quality indicators replace occasional, mostly emotional input like “This translation is bad!” This will lead to a beneficial boost in motivation to continue working on it.

Further benefits go as far as terminology, queries, and in-country review. For example, terminology can be defined, “translated”, voted, and approved collaboratively. Queries can be channeled to the right people, answered and then be shared with all translators and reviewers working on the project - or even with the authors, who might want to learn from translator queries to improve their source text. 

 

How to Implement Quality Assessment

After establishing this company-wide collaboration, translation quality assessment can elegantly be tied into the process. We suggest incorporating approaches from TAUS and QT21, such as content profiling or error typology:

·         Content profiling takes into account that not the company’s entire content needs to be treated equally in terms of quality: While emotional, brand-relevant public content might need to be reviewed completely, for internal content with a short shelf life a 10% sample should suffice. Clients and translation providers agree on the kind of content profiles that need to be reviewed and also define to what extent.

·         Error typology builds on the fact that not all errors are equally sensitive. A meaning error in a prominent spot is more severe than a stylistic error in a support article.

Combining these error type assessments with content profiling enables efficient evaluation of any text in terms of quality. Based on this evaluation, subsequent measures can be decided, ranging from instant publication to re-translation.

At the same time, each evaluation produces a quality score that will be tracked over time, thus providing business intelligence insights into the translation process. This makes it possible to recognize what kind of quality process certain vendors have implemented, which languages or resources are problematic, and whether certain quality improvement measures have been successful or not. And more importantly, it increases transparency and objectivity in a field that is notoriously ambiguous and highly emotional. Reviewers - who usually complain about having to “correct” all translations although having no time for it - should actively get involved in the long-term language quality assurance process, rather than “reviewing” translations or “translating” terminology. 

 

Conclusion

By regarding quality as a team effort and an ongoing improvement process rather than an occasional corrective measure, we can make all stakeholders allies rather than emotional opponents – and finally move away from occasional quality checks to consistent and collaborative quality assurance.

Klaus Fleischmann

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