By Tiziana Paloni
Transcribed in July 2018 during the author's Modlingua internship, from a Modlingua Live session on quality standards in language and translation services.
Source video: Modlingua Live session on translation quality standards
Hi! A very good evening to you. Today we are going to discuss what a quality standard is and its application in translation services. We will also understand what linguistic as well as non-linguistic requirements there are for maintaining compliance with the various types of quality standards applicable in translation services. Be with us. Thanks for watching, and do subscribe to our channel.
Why quality standards emerged
Today we will recover what is standard in translation, by trying to understand quality standards in translation. I have prepared this presentation, which I presented at LNMIIT Institute of Technology in 2009, where I was invited as a keynote speaker. Earlier, until the 90s, when we talk of quality standards, it was not there in the psyche of people, globally.
The explosion that has taken place in the 90s helped in the rapid growth of language services, localizing services. And when these services started coming into the picture, there used to be a mismatch of expectations between the consumer - when I say consumer here, it means the client - and the service provider, which could mean a translator or translation services people. Because of this mismatch there was conflict, many times unpleasant surprises given to the clients, many times unexpected demands in terms of translators or translation providers. So this gave rise to the question that was applied to the whole service industry: how to develop professional standards, so that mismatch of expectations can be handled.
DIN 2345 and the national standards bodies
The Germans have been very, very smart in initiating quality standards in translation. You might be knowing that Germany was the first one which initiated a quality standard for translation, under the name of the German Standard DIN 2345. They had been very smart introducing the automotive industry; mainly, translations were being deployed for the translation of manuals, of designs, of industry specifications or technical specifications for German manufacturers who were outsourcing their works to different parts of the world. So, in order to maintain consistency, they developed their own standard, and that is called DIN 2345. A variety of people participated in that, and it helped to some extent, specifically for the automotive industry translation, to understand the basic requirements in the translation industry.
When we talk of quality standards, certainly they refer to [voice not clear] and consistency. However, they are not to be taken as legally binding. They are, I will say, de-facto standards that people expect you to follow, and because of that also the concept has been developed. Almost all major countries have their own quality standard body. The Bureau of Indian Standards, called BIS, is the body in India that controls and standardizes our things. You might be knowing there is a concept called the ISO model. Similarly, in Japan there is a concept called JIS. China has its own standard, the "Chinese standard". Americans have their own, called ASTM. Canada also has a standard, the "Canadian standard". Germany's is DIN. In the European Union it is called EN, marking all European standards. There are quite a number of quality standards applied in industry, and the same kind of concept was adapted to the translation industry as well. Strictly speaking, this is not a law; however, people who are [voice not clear] to those standards are expected to follow the parameters defined as per those standards.
What certification implies
If you are, for example, an LSP, it is understood that you could be following certain parameters that are defined under particular standards. For example, Modlingua is an ISO 9001:2008 certified company; that means all companies of the world who are 9001:2008 certified will follow certain procedures of project management, quality management, client management, feedback mechanism, improvement mechanism, documentation mechanism, economics mechanism. So there are a variety of things that come into the picture in any office management, and these standards are created in order to increase efficiency.
There are very specific, highly demanding standards that demand Six Sigma - you might have come across this Six Sigma thing in management. If you are a black belt in quality standards and Six Sigma, you might be considered among the best persons in the quality management thing, and it has to do with know-how also. In brief, it refers to standardization of procedures and processes in order to increase the efficiency of a management process, minimize loss, and help in further improvement of processes. If you recall, I have given you a model, the AIDA model; in quality standards also there is the PDCA model that comes into the picture.
Documentation and continuous improvement
Luckily, I have been a certified quality standard trainer. It is a very intensive training and it is very useful. It teaches you how to improve your own self, your own working procedures, on a daily basis. When I say improve, how do you improve? You improve only when you document, only when you act, when you do errors, when you do repeated errors. What you have to have is a mechanism to check all these activities that you are doing, and for that you need to document. And once you have documented, you can repeat after one week, two months or six months, seeing where you are falling and where you are improving. Those parts which are improving, you need to further improve, and those parts which are going down or not doing well, where weaknesses are there, you need to improve. So you are able to identify your weaknesses as well as strengths only when you document all your activities. And you have to develop a mechanism for all your activities, and it takes time.
Many times you create a documentation procedure and you are not very sure of what happens to your documentation after a certain period of time. You find a gap, you fill it. Again you do some activities, you skill up something, again you find some weaknesses, again fill. So that is how you start from zero and move to further steps, find weaknesses and strengths, fill the gaps, again move, again move, and that is how you skill up and try to improve the efficiency of processes. And the moment you increase efficiency, your human resources start increasing.
Terminology and standards in translation
The same basic concept of a standard applies to our translation industry also. I have already explained in the previous slide how the quality standard that applies to different aspects of the processes of any industry or business refers to, matter number one, the linguistic concept: information processing, information and documentation, and certainly we have to follow terminological principles. And those terminological principles are defined in the ISO/TC 37 standard, another standard that is specific to terminological management. Similarly, standards refer not only to product, they also refer to testing, to process, to interface standards and data standards. If you go by what standards mean, one standard cannot be applied specifically for one house or one classroom or one office. It can be enlarged to a bigger office, to a group of offices, to a group of companies. And that is how the popularity and utility of those standards come into the picture. The more acceptability one standard has, the more important and more popular it becomes.
When we talk of the language market now, it has quality standards as [voice not clear], and at the same time the translation process has also evolved: from literature-based to administrative, from administrative to commercial, from commercial to IT, from IT to artificial intelligence, and to a kind of changing of the memory of the person. The next stage is going to come when you will have to just insert a kind of drive into your brain and you step up in Japanese or Chinese, or whatever it comes. Earlier we were putting floppies in hard disks; now scientists have already developed certain chips that can be inserted into the brain, and that brain makes an interface with those chips, and you are totally [voice not clear] because your hard disk improves your brain functions like anything. A time will come when a lot of things will happen, and language is playing an important role in all these developments.
The family of translation standards
As translation has evolved and the processes have evolved, translation standards have also evolved. I have talked to you about the DIN standard before; there are some popular standards that apply in translation: the American standard, then the standard developed in the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE J2450), then the European Union standards, the LISA standards, and so on. The most recent one is the ISO standard.
There is a misconception about translation, and that misconception is that language is something which does not have norms. Our brain functions in such a way that one word can be expressed in many forms, or one concept can be expressed in a hundred ways. Thus the fundamentals are: when we talk of technical translation, commercial translation or legal translation, expressions are practically given meaning not to a term but to one concept - for one concept there is one term. When there is one term, there is one conception, and vice versa; that means there is no point of deviation. If you are defining one concept and that has one term [music louder than voice] - but one concept has not only one primary term - the focus will be: if one standard is defined by this particular concept, you use this particular term. A language cannot be developed into a standardized form, and that is the reason why these concepts are applied in terminological management.
So translation standards are directly linked to terminological management aspects. And that terminology management happens for a particular company, for a particular industry, for a particular industry within a country, or it can be across countries as well. For example, a term expressed in French in France and a term expressed in French in Canada can vary. This variation can be minimized by putting them into a standard. If the automotive industry of Canada and the automotive industry of France agree that for this particular concept only this particular term will be used, then it becomes standardized globally.
Why standards protect both sides
In translation, when people say that your translation is not good, or your translation is bad or not acceptable [voice too fast] - without a reference point, I can always claim that my translation is the best, or clients can always claim that your translation is the worst, so they do not want to pay you. If translators feel their own way and clients feel their own way, they will not be on talking terms. How do they come to talking terms? They come to talking terms when both sit together and define what terminology is to be used, what process is to be followed, what words are to be avoided, what forms are to be used, what spacing is to be used, what is the size of the font. Apart from that, apart from linguistics, there are a large number of activities that come into the picture which are non-linguistic in translation, especially when we are talking of technical and commercial translation.
We will see how those points come into the picture, but meanwhile, there are such misconceptions also. If we are giving good quality standards, that means we are putting in large efforts, that means a translator is very good, smart enough, and by applying all these quality standard processes we have the right to increase the price of the project. I believe this is a wrong assumption, because quality standards are applied for increasing your efficiency, for increasing the efficiency of the process, for delivering flawless work to the client.
