Measuring Translation Quality: Constraints, Challenges and Solutions

Without clear goals and a repeatable, objective and accurate methodology, quality can be hard to measure, especially in the localization industry. From lack of knowledge to outside factors to subjective reviews, there are many reasons quality is hard to measure. In a past webinar called “A Practical Approach to Measuring Translation Quality”, I discussed my thoughts on challenges with measuring quality and potential solutions. I invite you to view the recording of the webinar as it will help you understand the many quality challenges faced by global businesses during their translation and localization projects. You’ll learn ways to overcome common quality-related challenges, including:

• How to resolve issues of quality awareness within your company
• How to define and reach agreement on quality standards
• Methods and tools for establishing and using quality metrics aligned to your industry
• New procedures for handling errors
• What money buys: key steps in translation and localization workflows where cost matters most and has a direct impact on quality

In this blog post, I’ll share some of the highlights from this webinar including project constraints, challenges and solutions. I’ll also cover a standard methodology in an upcoming blog post so make sure to subscribe to our blog or check back frequently.

Project Constraints

The three main project constraints are time, money and quality. If one of these constraints occurs, the project can fail. Unfortunately, quality often suffers because of time and money constraints. And quality is something you can’t afford to compromise with localization because you could lose customers or potential customers. Let’s look at the following project examples with constraints.

• Scenario #1 – A rush job with 10,000 words is delivered a day late. It might be a great translation, but if it’s late, then it doesn’t matter.

• Scenario #2 – A small translation job is delivered on time, but the measurements are left as in the source so the quality is compromised.

These projects suffered because of one of the project constraints. With time and money, it’s relatively easy to quantify the results of the constraints. With quality, it can be a lot more difficult.

Challenges with Measuring Quality

Even if you make quality a priority, how do you know that you’re getting high-quality content? Unless you have a repeatable, objective and accurate methodology to follow, you may not know. Quality can be challenging to measure for many reasons.

• Translations are often a “black box” – you send your content off to translation, but you don’t really understand what happens behind the scenes.
• You don’t know other languages to review the translations yourself.
• Even if you have someone who knows the language, it may be hard to fairly evaluate the translation because there’s a subjectivity factor that comes into play. For example, the reviewer may prefer to say, “The device will be placed on the patient’s skin” instead of the translated, “The device shall be attached to the patient’s skin.”
• The people responsible for quality at your company don’t know how to evaluate languages because they can’t apply typical objective quality standards, such as the number of defects and the number of returns, to translations like they can to products.
• There are too many factors outside of the translation that may affect the quality such as a problematic source file, rushed deadlines, not enough reference information or translators may not be trained on the product.
• There aren’t established goals and quality processes.
• There are expectation and perception differences between you and the Language Service Provider (LSP), which can often occur because of not having a quality plan.

As you can see, there can be a lot of factors that come into play when measuring quality.

Possible Solutions

There are many possible solutions for a lot of these issues, some of which can be handled before you send the content to your LSP such as allowing enough time for the job to be completed and having good English source files.

Another action is to take the time to make sure you really understand the localization process and what’s involved during each step. You may find some quick hits, such as creating a style guide or terminology glossary, or learn that some steps take longer than you realized. You’ll uncover these types of things if you understand all that goes into the localization process.

Conclusion and Additional Information

A key solution in determining quality is to partner with your LSP to implement a quality plan that has a repeatable, objective and accurate methodology. To kick this off, determine what’s most important regarding quality at your company. Work with your in-country champions if you have them or others in your business. For example, you may decide that you have certain mandatory quality requirements such as no typos or spelling errors. You’ll also need to think about the more challenging quality measures such as stylistic differences. In my next blog post, I’ll describe other factors to consider in developing a quality plan.

At Net-Translators, we’ve developed a quality methodology that’s repeatable, objective and accurate. Our translation quality assessment is a service we offer to assess localization quality. I’ll discuss our methodology more in my next blog post but invite you to reach out if you’re interested in an assessment.

I encourage you to join LinkedIn Group Measuring Localization Quality. Group members can learn more about measuring the quality of their ongoing localization efforts and how to evaluate new vendors for translating software, user interfaces, documentation, websites, and more. In addition, service providers can learn more about measurement tools, methods, and processes that can help improve the quality of the services they provide. I also invite you to follow our Localization Testing LinkedIn Showcase page and our LinkedIn Company page.

I initially posted this article for the Net-Translators website.