Before you start making a plan, it’s best to understand what you’re dealing with. Could it be time to start assessing your translations’ quality?
Language Quality Assessment (LQA) does exactly what it says on the tin. Your existing translations are analysed by professional linguists for quality and given an overall score – with any errors graded by severity and type. You’ll get an overview of the overall standard of the text, with insights into when and where there’s room for improvement.
Language Quality Assessment can be used in many ways:
- Perhaps you’ve found some legacy translations in your organisation, but you’re not sure who did them, or where they came from. An LQA can tell you whether or not they’re suitable for reuse as they are, or if they need to be updated in line with your current terminology, values, and branding.
- Maybe one of your website pages isn’t performing as well as you’d hoped. Testing the quality of the translations might help you get to the bottom of the issue.
- You might need an impartial second opinion on the quality of another provider’s work.
- If you’re considering Machine Translation, you can use LQA to find out whether the quality of the output is suitable for your documents, and test out different Machine Translation Engines to find one that best supports your needs. Or it can help train your own custom MT engines.
Once the LQA is done, you’ll gain a clear understanding of any issues and how to fix them. This could be adding in an extra proofreading step to your process in case of frequent grammatical or spelling issues. Or in cases of serious miscomprehension, you could look into different available translation options. You might discover it’s time to collate reference material or create a style guide or glossary if there are inconsistencies and wrongly translated internal company terminology. And for missed cultural references, you might need to hire a localisation expert to properly adapt your text for your target audience.
The LQA is impartial, because it is graded based on a pre-approved framework. Any subjective decisions will be documented through detailed commentary – so you can just focus on moving forward with the facts. And if you’re unsure where to go from there, your language service provider will be able to guide you in your decision-making and help you optimise your translations and process.
A smooth translation process means three things: saved time, saved money, and better quality. But to make these advances, you’ll first need to find out what areas you should work on. We think identifying and focusing on main areas for improvement is the key. Building a solid foundation and team to carry you through your future translation process is much more effective in the long term than blindly applying costly solutions to non-existent problems.