Quality Check Profiles – Safeguards Tailored for all Translations
Having recognized the need to localize their customer journeys for different regions of the world, many brands need to follow two essential pieces of criteria. They consist of accuracy and quality.
Even though brands include some relatively straightforward content when it comes to meaning, there is also content that can be referred as ambiguous. Actually, such material is open for interpretation or it needs more considerable attention to detail during the translation process. To avoid any errors are present, the content must be translated correctly and proofread properly.
What is the most problematic issue during a proofreading process is, not only is it done manually and is time-consuming, but a human error may occur as well. Such errors may be in a form of a mis-spelling, a missing space or word, or an emoji with a derogatory meaning.
The need of all brands is to have their content efficiently translated. At the same time they must be assured that their content has been translated accurately for their target market. So, both efficiency and accuracy is the winning combination during the process.
In fact, Quality Check Profiles represent a group of automated proofreading checkpoints tailored for specific content. They can be used to ensure translation and spacing consistency, proper spelling, correct symbol usage, etc. Quality Check Profiles are usually easy to set up on certain online translation and localization platforms, and they are assigned to a linguistic package. A linguistic package is a group of linguistic assets which include style guide and glossary. The advantage of using such a guide and glossary is that they can be used across multiple projects. Precisely, they can be applied to any type of content, thus enabling seamless proofreading to take place.
Quality Check Types
Furthermore, certain platforms allow brands to create multiple Quality Check Profiles, among which there can be those tailored for a specific type of content that needs translating. What is more appealing, brands are able to select from the following types of quality checks to build unique profiles:
TRANSLATION CONSISTENCY – TAGS, NUMBERS, EMOJIS, INSERTABLES, LEGAL SYMBOLS, AND MORE.
Translation consistency is means that the whole document, text or any other sort of translation material is easily comprehensible, with no discrepancies in the same terms, symbols or similar. Usually, the main types of consistency issues are:
- The same source word being translated with different target words (when context and meaning are identical). It often results in errors, bugs and confusion.
- the inconsistency of the source occur in the target. A good example may be English and French. Being more flexible than French, it does not mean that inconsistencies in English can be followed in French as well.
A lack of consistency in different parts of the translation work can reflect in:
A. Terminology
Common words usually have several translations. To avoid any discrepancies, there is a general rule to be adhered to when it comes to the hierarchy for terminology is
1. client’s specific instructions for the project,
2. glossary,
3. translation machine.
For example, these entries may serve well to demonstrate how confusing it may be if the wrong word is chosen, or two of them are used intermittently to mark the same thing in the source language.
company => entreprise, société
consultant => consultant, conseiller
customer service => service clients, service à la clientèle
device => appareil, dispositif, périphérique
email => courriel, courrier électronique, message électronique, e-mail
employee => employé, collaborateur
Capitalization (caps) can bring trouble as well. Depending on whether the object or place is referred to as a special one, having a particular purpose, or just a common one, it will seriously affect a translator’s preference over employing capitalization or avoiding it. Like in the bellow shown examples, the noun is the same, but capitalization is that particular feature that gives an important piece of information.
le service client/le Service client
le Bureau des réclamations/le bureau des reclamations
Gender: Since English does not recognize gender inflections like French, either masculine or feminine gender should be used throughout the whole document (i.e the default choice). Never both interchangeably. However, it is possible to use a masculine gender noun and add the inflection signaling the feminine gender in the brackets, as shown bellow.
Example: l’employé(e)
- Syntax:
Titles in the table of contents need to match their source counterparts. It can be achieved by choosing a consistent construction for titles. In addition, all nominal groups from the source should have the target language nominal group. All verbal groups have to match verbal groups. However, if this strict match is not possible, an adequate group should be introduced. In the bellow provided example we can see that both English and French words for chapter coincide. They are both nouns. On the other hand, evaluation is a noun, while in the target field, there is a French word of the same meaning, but in a form of a verb. As one may conclude, when 100% match is impossible, the next step is to use the first best solution which will not alter the meaning.
Example: Chapter 1: Preventing X; Chapter 2: Evaluation of Y
=> Chapitre 1 : Prévenir X ; Chapitre 2 : Évaluer Y
Bullet lists encounter with the same issue. Infinitive, conjugated verb or a noun should be chosen.
Infinitive vs imperative: choosing between infinitive and 2nd person imperative cases may give linguists a headache. While English has only one form representing both infinitive and imperative, French clearly makes a distinction between these two. Therefore, it can be rather confusing whether a simple English verb should be understood as an expression of order, a piece of advice, or an instruction in French.
Being neutral, the French infinitive is often used for safety warnings, technical indications, short instructions, general user instructions, signs, and recipes.
The imperative, on the other side, is much closer to the reader. Therefore, it is best to use it for giving instructions which are to be followed personally.
Of course, the purpose of these example being listed above is to choose one form and adhere to it. The consistency issue may not be spotted due to software segmentation and format, hence the reference source documents/PDFs must be checked.
- Format:
Apostrophes should be curly in the French In case of a specific instruction given for a certain project or a style guide, then the rule is set by the instructor. However, without any specific instructions and if the TM has straight apostrophes or a mix of both, the curly ones are to be used. In short notice, a Q&A is to be informed in order to pass the notification further to the client.
Bullet lists: one should make sure reference the source documents/PDFs since software segmentation and format do not always display it clearly.
The general rule says that if the sentence in the bullet is a complete sentence, it should be started with a cap and ended with a period. However, if the sentence is continued in the bullet, there should be no cap and it should end with a semi colon. The last bullet should end with a period.
Helpful Tools.
To provide consistency across large projects, various tools are used by linguists and project managers. Such projects are usually long-term ones and require several translators.
- SR32 enables taking notes of terms/structures that are considered to require more consistency.
- Skype is a wonderful tool for big projects requiring several translators, in the situations when the consistency task becomes very heavy at the review process. For that reason, it is helpful to communicate with other linguists and thus make the overall cooperation successful. By creating a Skype conversation with all linguists working on the project, everyone is kept informed and can easily access to previous discussions. Moreover, project managers can follow the process and share relevant information both with the contractor and other linguistic teams as well.
- Google enables a Q&A check before translating/reviewing.
- Numerous private Facebook groups provides linguists with a possibility to cooperate
To consider translation consistency quality checks, one needs:
- legal symbols, such as registered trademarks, carried over as-is in the translated content
- to avoid certain phrases translated as there is no equivalent phrase in the target language
SPACING QUALITY – SPACING ERRORS AND TARGET LENGTH LIMITS.
Typical use cases for spacing quality involve:
- avoidance to carry over the non-breaking spaces in source content for a specific translation
- the translated content cannot be more than 50 words
OTHER QUALITY CHECKS – SPELL CHECK, SOURCE OR TARGET IN THE WRONG LANGUAGE, REPEATED WORD(S), etc.
There can be included things such as:
- translations need to be spelled correctly
- the content needs to be translated in the correct language
Assign by Severity
The reason lying behind the fact that Quality Check Profiles are assigned by severity is that some extremely important content will need to be proofread and translated properly over other types of content.
In fact, Quality Check Profiles are essentially a group of quality checks with severity level settings for each check. Clients are enabled to assign each profile with one of the settings below:
NO ERRORS SHOWN IN THE CAT TOOL
- Disabled – it literally means that Quality checks are disabled
QUALITY CHECK ENABLED WITH ERRORS SHOWN IN THE CAT TOOL
- Low Severity – In this case, despite low severity being shown, the translator can save and submit work regardless of the error.
- Medium Severity – With this warning being shown in the CAT tool, the translator has two options – to either fix or accept the error before saving and submitting.
- High Severity – When this thing happens, the translator is being prevented from saving and submitting a string until the error has been resolved by this quality check.
A Quality Check enabled, any errors are displayed in a sidebar and in-line alongside the respective string within the CAT Tool, thus allowing translators to quickly identify which stings need to be given full attention to.
