Translation is a serious business, and it requires time and effort to generate culture-proof and quality translations. When it comes to maintaining the quality of translations, there are various parameters on which you can evaluate the quality of your translations and improve them accordingly. Stakes are high when you have non-effective quality assurance processes in place. Bad translations don’t just cost you money but also your brand reputation in a foreign marketplace.
It’s important for language services provider platforms and professional translators to smartly approach their QA testing to achieve high-quality translations. This article discusses some QA tips as well as the different stages of quality assurance.
How to Effectively Check and Improve Translation Quality?
Perform Early and Frequent Testing
Quality assurance is not the final touchup of your content, but it goes along with your translation processes from the very beginning. Companies adopt continuous localization methods, in which translations go hand in hand with development phrases. It allows the developers and translators to effectively collaborate with each other and work on the quality gaps together. So, it is important to keep an eye on your translation quality throughout your translation project management.
Hire Experts for Manual Proofreading
You must have professional translators and editors who manually proofread each translated document to ensure accuracy, relevance, and cultural appropriateness. Your team of translators should have a good understanding and knowledge of the target audiences and their core demands. It’ll allow them to improve your translation quality, and make sure your translations are resonating with the unique brand tone. Similarly, for every industry and specific brand, the translation requirements might change. Your editor must have sufficient industrial experience to effectively judge the quality of a translated document and find room for improvement.
Use A Professional QA Testing Tool
To keep your translation quality assurance seamless and effective, you can sign up with a cloud based localization management system. These tools come with a lot of advanced features that allow you to effectively measure your translation quality. You can use both automated and manual QA testing on translations. When you use TMSs, they have automated QA testing tools that would allow you to check for the quality of your translated documents in seconds. Such tools not just highlight the mistakes in your documents, but also provide you with suggestions to correct the mistakes and improve the overall quality and readability of your content.
Phases of Translation Testing
Linguistic Testing
First thing first, you have to check your translated document for its linguistic quality assurance and contextual relevance. The translated content should be error-free and culturally suitable for their target audiences. The finalized translations must communicate your brand message effectively to target audiences without altering the original context and meaning of the text.
Also, make sure all translated versions of the same text are consistent in their tone and style. Especially, when you have multiple translators working on a single translation project, it is common to have inconsistency. In the QA phase, you must overcome this issue and create a uniform brand voice.
Functional & Design Testing
When your translations are placed on the website or software, they should perfectly fit the design and complement the functionality of the platform. When you place the translated content on your website, app, or software, you will get to know about mistakes like formatting issues, placeholders’ presence, extra spaces, and inconsistent font styles.
Similarly, sometimes the translated content overlaps with the design of your software because some languages take more/less space than others. A professional cloud based localization management system can also help you keep your translations completable with website design and features. You can integrate your design tools and website with TMS and make changes directly from a language service provider platform.
Contextual Testing
In the end, it is important to keep the translation context aligned with the original message. Sometimes when many remote translators are working on your translations, they may have gaps in the project’s understanding that lead to quality issues. It is important to proofread and edit each translation document to make sure that the content is culturally and contextually appropriate.
To check the context quality of your translation, you better do it manually because machine QA tools may overlook the contextual details.
Conclusion
Ensuring the quality of your translations is significant to build your credibility in a foreign marketplace. Quality gaps in translations are common when you have an extensive volume of content to manage and multiple translators are working on one project. Project managers must make sure that their content quality is up to the mark by adopting effective quality assurance measures. For quality assurance purposes, you can combine manual proofreading and automated QA testing for your translations.