Measuring Translation Quality

One of the questions often asked in translation circles is how to go about measuring translation quality.

Clients want to know how the freelancer ensures that a translation standard is met, and freelancers want to know how what requirements a client will use when assessing the quality of the translation.

While it may seem straightforward, this is not necessarily the easiest question to answer because there are a lot of different issues when it comes to translation quality standards. These issues include everything from defining what constitutes a quality translation to deciding who is in charge of measuring that quality.

Who defines translation quality?
The first problem with assessing translation quality is deciding on who defines it. The companies and organizations that have translation quality standards normally use their own in-house methods. While this is fine, it doesn't lend itself very well to standardizing quality across the translation industry.

Since each organization uses its own methods, there is definitely a lack of consistency. As a freelancer, this can be maddening trying to figure out what exactly the client considers a quality translation. Some companies use machine translation quality and statistical methods to help measure translation quality, while other companies use more qualitative methods, such as assigning quality scores depending on different classes of errors that are made in a translation. This is similar to standardized evaluations that done by the American Translators Association, where translations are judged by humans based on a set number of factors. (Although some people feel that the ATA graders don't follow enough of a standard metric.)

While many large organizations (think Dell, Google, etc.) heavily rely on translation quality control and assurance, most freelance translators I know don't deal with clients that have any quality control mechanism in place. Most clients don't take the time to define a process for managing translation quality, and instead rely on the freelancer to provide the best product possible, which the translators often prefer.

International Standards of Translation Quality
Sometimes translators ask about ISO certification as a quality control method for measuring translation quality. The thing to keep in mind about ISO certification (or ISO 9001:2000, as it's officially called) is that instead of measuring the quality of a translation, it is set up to certify that there is a quality translation process in place. This is not the same as measuring translation quality, so keep this in mind. Here is more information on ISO translation quality.

If you'd like more information on some of the issues involved with translation quality measurements, there is a great article you can read, titled "Buyers Join Forces to Tackle the Translation Quality Measurement Conundrum".

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