One way to make the concept of quality assurance easier for linguists is to divide it up into four parts: administrative quality, linguistic quality, business quality and cultural quality.

International quality standards focus mostly on administrative quality, since it is the easiest to measure. Linguistic quality is the most important for language professionals. Business quality is defined as the relation to the customer, and cultural quality is when a translation speaks to the end customer/reader.

All four types of quality assurance are important for linguists and warrant further investigation. Here we’ll look at these four types and tips for translators to enhance quality every step of the translation process.

Four Types of Quality Assurance

Administrative Quality

This entails all routines for handling translation projects, inquiry, offer, order confirmation, translation, control/check, delivery, invoicing, follow up, archiving.

Linguistic Quality

This can only be achieved if you:
– Only accept projects that are within your expertise
– Have access to suitable, current reference material
– Use relevant tools that increase quality, for example translation memory and spell checking
– Proofread the end result carefully

Business Quality

This type can only be achieved if you:
– In advance check with the customer what they want/what is needed
– Deliver a product that fulfill the terms agreed upon

Cultural Quality

This means that you’re:
– Are thoroughly familiar with the cultural context of the source text
– Translate the text based on the cultural environment of the target language so that the text will have the same meaning

What Can a Translator Do for Quality Assurance?

1. Only accept jobs within your area of expertise/specialization and only translate into your native language.
2. Use CAT-tools to avoid omissions and eye mistakes and to keep the formatting.
3. Never hesitate to contact your customer for clarifications.
4. Find another translator to co-operate with for second proofreading when needed.
5. Always read the clients reference material and use their glossaries
6. Know the target audience for the final product and translate for this audience.
7. Understand the objective of the translation project; is it informative text, ad copy, brand identity…?
8. Use Translation Quality Assurance software if available. These are able to decrease the number of mistakes and improve the overall quality, even if they cannot detect everything, or detect too much/the wrong things.
9. Proofread carefully.

Even More Tips to Increase Quality Assurance

1. Avoid rework by translating each phrase as if the translation were to be published immediately.
2. Keep a list of dangerous words that you often mistype, but that a spell checker cannot detect.
3. Run the spell and grammar checker. Before doing this though, select the entire document, set the language to your target language and make sure that the checker is fully active.
4. Learn study and comply with target-language typography and punctuation rules. I have noticed that this is one of the most common mistakes among newer translators. For example in US English you write $3,000.00, but in Swedish it is written USD 3 000,00.
5. Never use the “Replace all” command
6. Proofread by comparing with the source, but also by just reading the target text to check that it “flows”.
7. Check headers, footer, graphs and text boxes. These are easy to miss; even CAT-tools can miss them sometimes.

Last but not least, read in your target language often and take continuing education classes at conferences, universities, translation associations etc.

I found these definitions very useful. It is easier to work on quality assurance if you can break it up into these aspects and follow them. What do you think? Do you have a system for quality assurance?

Check also:

• The Role of Translators in the Software Localization Process
• How to Spot a Great Transcreator
• How to Spot a Subpar Translator?
• The Benefits of Choosing Swedish Translation Services