Accurate Translation: Why You Need a Quality Management Strategy

Accurate Translation: Why You Need a Quality Management Strategy

Accurate Translation: Why You Need a Quality Management Strategy 6000 4000 Accelingo

How to Achieve Accurate Translation in 3 Steps?

Accurate translation into even one foreign language can boost your startup’s growth and facilitate global expansion. Adopting a 3-step quality management strategy that focuses on the processes prior to, during, and after the translation will ensure high linguistic quality. Here is how it works.

How to Guarantee Translation Quality Prior to the Actual Translation?

In order to guarantee fluent and accurate translation of your content, you need professional translation services. You need to choose the best translation agency for your startup based on your products, goals, and target audience.

A translation partner that has expertise and experience in your market niche will facilitate the overall expansion process by providing on-time translation services and high-quality support throughout your global expansion.

Common Sense Advisory suggests that you need to address translation quality in your market penetration strategy as early in the process as possible in order to save time and money. Open communication with the language service provider (LSP) at all translation stages is the best solution.

To ensure that you’ll receive an accurate translation, prior to submitting your request, double-check that the LSP:

  • Can meet your deadline
  • Has expertise in your industry
  • Fully understands your product and your target market
  • Meets your technical requirements—works with the CAT tool you prefer, supports the desired source and target file formats, uses a QA tool to guarantee accuracy
  • Is flexible to changes throughout the language translation process

To facilitate the translation workflow, it is necessary for you to provide the LSP with a detailed list of your project requirements that may feature:

  • Your corporate terminology
  • Your style guide
  • Details about your target audience
  • Your company’s values or your product’s/service’s specific message

Rand Fishkin, Moz’s co-founder, suggests that you need to write a text that is 10 times better than the first ten search results for a particular keyword in order to beat the competition. Writing your content with translation in mind will save your startup future localization costs and ensure your translation agency produces accurate translation.

Quality Management during Translation

An essential part of your translation quality management strategy is the actual process of translation. Both you and your LSP need to keep all communication channels open and ensure that any issues are clarified in the very moment they arise.

The translators are the first external check of the content quality, and any issues related to it shall be addressed as soon as possible. All queries need to be reported and efficiently resolved, which can be achieved only through sound collaboration between all interested parties—client, translators, project manager, developers and/or designers.

To facilitate a translation process that would lead to an accurate translation, all issues should be logged in a translation tool accessible to all stakeholders. Translators shall be able to track queries and their answers, while the other parties shall be able to comment, answer, or redirect queries.

Adopting language-technology tools to assist with translation is gaining popularity. While back in 2009 a study by the European Commission Directorate-General for Translation revealed that only 562 out of 1,103 respondents used such a tool, now this has become the norm to ensure quality.

A translation management system (TMS) will help manage and automate the translation workflow. A reliable LSP committed to producing accurate translations shall employ such a tool to guarantee accuracy of used terminology and faster translation project turnaround without compromising the quality of the translation.

The Importance of Post-Translation QA

Post-translation quality assurance is a vital element of your quality management strategy to ensure accurate translations and, as a minimum, it can include two elements:

  • Translation review by an editor and proofreader to make sure the text is free from any spelling, grammar, or stylistic errors
  • In-country review with all its challenges as described by Klaus Fleischmann’s interview for GALA

A qualified LSP normally exercises a full QA on the translated text prior to submitting it to the client. A QA tool such as SDL Studio Trados, MemoQ, or Verifika is often used to save time and curb costs while ensuring the highest possible accuracy and quality. You can also expect a proof exported from the program as a verification of the performed check.

The Role of the Translation Project Manager

Part of the professional translation services is to assign a translation project manager to be in charge of each individual client. As a single point of contact, the job of project managers is to facilitate the overall process by ensuring that:

  • The translation workflow is customized according to your needs
  • All the documentation related to a given project is properly stored
  • There is an established translation memory and terminology glossaries related to your project that can be used throughout the translation and for future reference (have you already checked our article on the benefits of translation memory?)
  • All issues arising in the translation process are timely addressed
  • QA was properly completed

As the translation project manager will get to know your company and product in detail, they may also offer invaluable linguistic advice to help enhance the overall quality of the translation process and ensure the delivery of accurate translations.

You can learn more about successful cooperation with a translation company in our free whitepaper on How to Choose a Translation Company That’s Right for Your International Expansion Strategy.

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