By Sougand Akbarian
Broadly speaking, there are 7 types of quality standards in translation that are very popular ones. They are DIN German 1998, ONORM Austrian 2000, GB/Chinese 2004, ASTM USA 2008, EN 2006, Canadian 2008, and ISO that the last one is new. These quality standards are evaluated based on some factors as, translation, interpretation, individuals, companies, the basis of certification, voluntary compliance, mandatory compliance, and audit required. That the result for each one can be yes, no, or N/A. (this one is based on quality assessment in translation by Jiri Stejskal, 2006) but still, we can use it somehow in 2019.
Generally, Iso does not focus on the text, but rather it focuses on the qualification of translators, editors, and management (that this one is about nonlinguistic aspect). And now about US standards which is better than the European one. It has 3 phases, specification, production, and post-project. In the first phase, the specification phase, there is a manager and communication between translators and clients. Clients provide the specification of the project, and when the contract is made, the production phase comes into the picture. In the production phase we should see, terminology, who is the project manager/translator. Once the translation is done then it will review by the reviser and client will receive it. And now the client is free to give feedback for better translation in future and not giving any feedback.
LISA standard is another one that is good for home linguistic errors and nonlinguistic errors. If based on this standard your translation be beyond 90%, it will be acceptable, otherwise, it will be rejected and should review that to make it better. ISO 17100:215 standard, is translation plus revision a must. And certification of competence is required by the government. That is, one is between clients and translators, as a team work. Till now all focused-on process. But the last one will focus on the text. DIN standard, focus on original text that what it is exactly, by format, terminology, linguistic aspects. So, the best one is ISO that is international and there will be no more worry. Because it will be generalized. So, such standards are easily for countries with one, two, or three languages, but a country as India that has many languages and dialects, you need different standards as personal ones also. Because some people are bilingual, so it will be a little difficult.
