By Kruti Sanjeev
This essay was written in June 2018 during the author's Modlingua internship, answering the assignment questions: Why are quality standards important? What is the importance of a feedback mechanism in the quality control process? Does the Modlingua Rubric provide for any feedback?
Why quality standards matter
Quality standards are designed by industries and cooperatives to ensure that the service provided is compatible with the client's request, and so that a level of professionalism and efficiency is maintained in all the work of every service provider in that industry. Quality standards act as guidelines for service providers and as an assurance for the client that the industry upholds the importance of achieving certain goals in the services it provides. In the translation business specifically, these standards help in successfully translating the original text so that its information and intent are not lost in misinterpretations. Although having quality standards does not guarantee the absence of mistakes or inefficiencies in translation, they help identify these errors easily. Maintaining quality standards in translation is extremely important, considering that this industry plays a role in other industries that have a direct impact on people's lives, such as the legal, medical and financial industries.
The role of feedback in quality control
Although quality standards help avoid some inefficiencies in translation, they may not allow service providers to fully understand the mistakes they made in their translations according to the unique requirements of a client. Therefore, there is a crucial need for a feedback mechanism to be present in the process of quality control. Feedback mechanisms act as a system to improve the final drafts of translated documents after processing and reacting to the end user's comments and specifications. They also help translation service providers understand the mistakes they made by evaluating their performance on the document they translated, comparing it to the goals they had to achieve - generally set by quality standards - and deciding whether the document should be submitted to the client or requires editing. At a very basic level, feedback mechanisms give immediate feedback to a person so that they may change their behavior and achieve the result that is needed. Their aim is not to analyse the past performance of an individual but rather to help him or her improve his or her performance in the future. Feedback mechanisms not only help provide clients their desired outcomes, they also help track the progress of service providers so they can understand what they need to do to achieve the quality standards set by the cooperative.
How the Modlingua Rubric provides feedback
In terms of providing feedback, the Modlingua Rubric for error control and analysis of content writing is efficient in helping service providers understand the mistakes they made through self-assessing their documents. The rubric covers ten types of errors one could make in translating documents: errors in the article, punctuation, omissions, spelling, choice of words, consistency, grammar, sentence structure, formatting, and factual errors. The rubric looks at the overall document while also highlighting specific details that one may usually ignore. This helps in submitting a well-written and detailed document to the client with as few errors as possible. It is very efficient in reducing the chances of making errors and also in removing errors in the future, as service providers understand the errors that can be made; thus, the quality of documents produced is more professional as well as better structured.
