BY YELLAREDDY VARSHANTH REDDY

From the past couple of decades, there has been an expeditious expansion of communication around the world thus leading to rapid growth in demand for translation and localization activities. And the absence of consumer-oriented guidelines leading to a mismatch of people supplying the translation affecting the project quality leaving the translators shocked and the consumers surprised. Hence there was a need for reference guidelines in translation activities.  

As the development of national standards in different parts of the world gained importance. By the concerted efforts by professionals, language service providers and organizations involved in the promotion & implementation of quality standards there were made efforts to prepare and disseminate guidelines for quality standards in translation activities. The standards are properly prepared by an officially acknowledged standard body.  

This reference quality standards guide helps the end-users to get a reasonable assurance of quality as per the stipulated standards and at the same time helps translators and translation service providers to attain their goal in developing professionalism in offering services.   

It is not surprising, therefore, that international general specific standards have been formulated, all with the goal to help language service providers provide their customers with the quality deliverable. All of these standards fall into two broad categories:  

Process-oriented: These standards focus on establishing and maintaining a process of translation, review, and approval that, when followed diligently by qualified professionals, will consistently result in translations that meet customer expectations. These include ISO 9001 which certifies a quality system that provides the framework for better customer satisfaction, staff motivation and continuous improvement, ISO 17100 standard which defines the requirements of the language service provider in regards to personnel and technical resources, quality control, project management, client contract parameters, and management methods. 

Metrics-oriented: These standards focus on establishing actual quality metrics against which a translation can be measured and rated as high- or low-quality. 

These include the ATA Metric, which was developed by the American Translators Association to be used as an evaluation tool to test the quality of a translated text, The LISA (Localization Industry Standard Association) Scorecard is a quality assurance model designed to promote the best translation and localization methods for the software and hardware industries. This model grades translations based on a scoring system that measures the severity of issues as critical, major or minor and provides a point value for each offense. 

Vertical-specific: These standards specify requirements for a quality management system where an organization needs to demonstrate its ability to provide medical devices and related services that consistently meet customer and applicable regulatory requirements. 
ISO 13485, which specifies requirements for a quality management system where an organization needs to demonstrate its ability to provide medical devices and related services that consistently meet customer and applicable regulatory requirements. With the language service provider implementing processes that reduce the potential for product risks, the medical device company reduces its exposure to compliance and legal issues, not to mention the risk to customers. 

Translation quality standards play an important role but they are no substitute for providing on-going training and feedback to translators, as well as arming translators and editors with the necessary resources and information on the subject matter, the context in which the translation will be used, etc. Translation teams who are equipped with glossaries, style guides, support materials, and contextual information can produce a translation of much higher quality than those who are just handed a text with no background. In these cases, the focus shifts from quality control to quality improvement.