MultiLing's goal is to provide defect-free
documentation through the primary steps of terminology extraction,
maintenance of client-specific terminology databases, in-country
translation, edit, review, desktop publishing, and ongoing quality
control steps for each phase of the process. We generally do not sample
small parts of the documentation, but rather review the entire
documentation, page by page, in every step of our process (one sampling
process we do use is for the strict purpose of providing linguistic
feedback to our translation teams via a uniform metric). Many of our
review steps (such as format verification and terminology verification)
are performed automatically through software or quality-assurance
scripts. Some review steps are performed manually.
Our organization also has a very extensive quality assurance system including two phases:
| 1. |
Preventive quality control |
| 2. |
Corrective quality control |
Under
preventive quality control, we ensure the careful selection of
specialists having the necessary background and language skills,
translating exclusively into their native tongue. Preventive quality
control also includes:
- Continuous
training on new information technologies, and using the most up-to-date
software (translation & DTP software, and various tools);
- Our effort in collecting reference files and making them available to our translators;
- Terminology management and automated terminology usage;
- Checking of incoming materials and data, and, if required, corrective measures on the source data;
- Task analysis and project planning;
- Careful preparation of project before actually starting the main work (translation);
- Protecting tags and formatting information; and
- Reviewing source files to validate document design and file integrity.
Our group, on a systematic basis, implements all of these preventive quality measures.
Our
quality control philosophy emphasizes prevention as opposed to
correction. However, we have corrective quality assurance by
implementing:
- A system of procedures to check quality systematically before delivery to the customer (e.g., proofreading);
- Development
of machine-aided quality assurance tools and usage of such tools as a
standard procedure (such tools are able to find multiple types of
problems);
- Verification of tags and formatting information to ensure file integrity after translation; and
- Verification that consistent terminology is used throughout all documentation
Metrics are also used to track translation performance of MultiLing's translation teams
The general criteria of the metrics are classified into the following categories:
Category “Accuracy”
Category “Terminology”
-
Adherence to glossary, inconsistency
- Abbreviations
- Context
Category “Language”
- Grammatical errors
- Semantics, wrong word
- Punctuations
- Spelling
Category “Style”
- General style
- Register and tone
- Language variants and slang
Category “Country”
- Country standards
- Local suitability
- Company standards