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”
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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
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