What do you do if your linguistic project lacks quality assurance and control?

1 Assess the situation

The first step to addressing quality issues is to assess the situation and determine the scope and severity. To do this, review your project objectives, specifications, requirements, and deliverables, and compare them with the actual outputs and outcomes. Additionally, solicit feedback from team members, clients, users, or reviewers to identify any gaps, discrepancies, or complaints. Ask yourself questions such as: what are the quality criteria and indicators for your project? How do you measure and monitor the quality of your project? What are the sources and causes of the quality problems? How often and how much do the quality problems occur? How do the quality problems affect your project performance, reputation, and satisfaction? Gathering this information will help you determine how to address any quality issues.

2 Implement corrective actions

The second step is to implement corrective actions to address the quality problems and prevent them from worsening or recurring. To do this, you can use various methods and tools, such as error analysis to identify types, frequencies, and patterns of errors in your project outputs. Error correction involves correcting the errors in your project outputs, either manually or automatically, and verifying the accuracy and consistency of the corrections. Error prevention involves implementing quality checks and controls at different stages of your project workflow, such as data validation or peer review. Finally, error feedback provides feedback to your team members, clients, users, or reviewers about the errors and corrections, as well as explaining the reasons and solutions for those errors.

3 Improve the process

The third step is to improve the process and optimize the quality of your project. You can achieve this by analyzing the efficiency and effectiveness of your project process, and identifying any bottlenecks, redundancies, or risks that affect the quality. You can also improve the project process by streamlining, simplifying, or standardizing the steps, tasks, or roles involved, and by adopting best practices, guidelines, or standards for quality. Furthermore, you can automate the project process by using tools, software, or systems that can perform or assist with some of the tasks. Lastly, you should document the project process by creating or updating the manuals, protocols, or reports that describe the procedures, methods, or results of the project.

4 Learn from the experience

The fourth step is to learn from the experience and enhance your skills and knowledge for future projects. You can do this by conducting quality audits to review and assess the quality performance of your project, writing a quality report to summarize and communicate the quality findings, participating in quality training to update and upgrade your skills, and joining a quality network to exchange experiences. Additionally, you can identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for quality improvement, provide recommendations, suggestions, or lessons learned for quality enhancement, and learn from other linguists or quality professionals' best practices.

5 Seek external support

The fifth step is to seek external support if you need additional help or guidance for your project. This can be done by consulting with quality experts, hiring quality services, using quality tools, and engaging with quality communities. Quality experts can advise on project quality issues, while quality services offer specialized solutions. Quality tools provide useful features or functions, and quality communities offer platforms to interact with other linguists or access quality information.