By Ashutosh Prateek
Like any supplier of goods or services, a translator has to potentially go through some ethical and legal obligations toward his employer. For the protection of both parties, standards have been developed that seek to embrace their mutual duties.
The translation business requires superior precision because even one poorly translated word can affect the meaning and quality of a project. For industries that have a direct impact on people’s lives, such as those in the areas of pharmaceutical, legal, and finance, accurate translations are especially critical. With that in mind, international standards have been developed for language service providers to ensure they achieve high-quality translations. A strong quality assessment process is at the heart of any impactful and measurable localization program.
In general, there are two types of quality standards in the field of translation. Namely:
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Process-oriented
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Metrics-oriented
Process-oriented: The holistic approach to the translator's competence and translation quality assurance from a process-oriented perspective highlights the need for optimization and harmonization of translation strategies and of quality standards with respect to experiential learning and professional development, and individual accountability, translated as (self-)monitoring, (self-)assessment and strategic planning.
For Example ISO 17100:2015, it covers the main aspects like the reorganization of tasks into three macro-processes: pre-production, production and post-production, and also the addition of the project manager’s profile and role as one of the key participants in the translation project workflow.
Metrics-oriented: Metrics are a set of rules that allow users to measure how much a product (the translation) meets requirements, and metrics are generally used to measure performance. The primary goal of measuring, of course, is to create a standard against which something can be judged. What’s often forgotten is that metrics can be used not only to measure performance but also to identify specific problems that are affecting performance. Effective metrics must be objective (measurable), unbiased, and able to provide enough resolution (detail) to assess the factors that need improvement. This means that any two people who set out to calculate the value of a metric must be able to produce comparable results.
For example, Typical metrics are SAE J2450, recently elevated to a standard, whose goal is just to provide “a tangible method for measuring the quality of translation deliverables as precisely as for any manufactured product.”SAE J2450 provides for severe and minor occurrences of wrong terms (glossary violation or conflict with de facto standard translations), syntactic errors, omissions, word structure or agreement errors, misspellings, punctuation errors, and any linguistic errors related to the target language and that is not clearly attributable to the other categories.
There are a number of different quality standards that are applicable to the language services industry. Not all of the ones that cover translation services will also apply to interpretation services, as these tend to be assessed by separate quality standards.
At last the main concern should be on the notion that “without measurement, there is no improvement”. To have a transformative impact on a client’s work, translations have to be superlative, not just sufficient or even just good. The translation quality standards play a very vital and important role but they are no substitute for providing on-going training and feedback to translators, as well as providing translators and editors with the necessary resources and information on the subject matter, context for which the translation has to be done. The Translation teams who are equipped with vocabulary, sufficient and apt jargon, style guides, and contextual information can produce a translation of much higher quality. In these cases, the focus shifts from quality control to quality improvement.
