Whether it’s agile localization or continuous localization, these approaches are integral to our expertise. We are fully equipped to leverage our experience to meet your specific needs.

On a daily basis we widely employ specialized translation management software:

Localization is a multifaceted and rigorous process that encompasses translation, editing, and proofreading, among other tasks. Central to ensuring the integrity of this process is automated quality assurance (QA) of the translated text, playing a critical role in maintaining standards. But what exactly is quality assurance, and why is it indispensable?

Even with relatively short texts, human errors are inevitable — they can range from inconsistent term usage to omitted tags or even minor typos like double spaces. How can we identify and eliminate these errors to guarantee the highest quality of the final product?

The answer lies in a suite of automated QA tools, such as Xbench, Verifika, QA Distiller, and more, designed to address these challenges effectively. Those tools scan bilingual file for potential issues. What exactly are those “issues”? They can be split into several categories:

• Inconsistent terminology
• Inconsistency in the translation of identical text segments (and vice versa: the same target text derived from different sources)
• The correctness of “variables”: numbers and their format, links, units, punctuation marks, extra/incorrect spaces, etc.
• Inconsistency between the tags in the source and the target
• Spelling mistakes
• Observation of general localization rules (grammatical constructions, text presentation, etc.)

Our favorite QA tool, ITI Phoenix, can create reports that identify the abovementioned issues. It also allows updating files right from the report simply by pressing a button. The types of QA checks that can be accomplished with Phoenix include:

• Terminology Consistency. This type of check is needed to identify inconsistently and incorrectly translated glossary terms. The system uses a glossary (or several, if needed) that are stored in an online terminology management system MultiQA. This system stores a database of glossaries sorted by project category. This database is “live” and it is possible to constantly update and edit it during the project’s or term’s life cycle. Another great asset of this tool is the built-in generation of grammatical forms for each term that become automatically entered into the glossary. This allows a dramatic reduction in the number of false positives at the stage of checking terminology, which in turn reduces the time spent on the process.
• Inconsistent Segments. This type of check allows identifying inconsistent segments in the translation. The tool scans the source text (and the target) for identical segments, and then checks whether the translation for them matches, or (if we are talking about the target text) whether they come from the same source. All of the mismatched segments are added to the report.
• Localization Rules. This check ensures that the numbers in the target text match those in the source text, the dates are localized in the correct way, the punctuation is correct, and there are no double/trailing spaces.
• Tags & Entities. This type of check allows ensuring that all the tags from the source text are present in the target text in the correct way (the same number, and in the needed places).
• Spelling. This check’s purpose is to make sure that the words in the target text are spelled correctly.
• Marked Segments. There are situations when either the translator or editor is unsure whether a text segment has been correctly translated. Should this situation arise, they can mark the problematic text segment with a ‘translator doubt’ notification to draw the project manager’s attention to it. This type of check allows filtering all those marked segments into a separate report for an in-depth analysis.
• Preview and All strings. Those reports cover all translated text segments. The text in «Preview» is presented in two ways: with and without the tags. The second option is useful when there are a lot of tags present, which can make the text hard to read. The “All strings” report is useful for specialized final checks, which include checking words and word forms that are not considered to be terms, special project checks (whether the text presentation meets the customer’s standards), and regular term checks (terms common for the language or individual involved in the project).
• Updated Segments. A report based on all the checks performed that allows tracking the updates made for bilingual files.

It’s no secret that each project requires a unique approach. That is why we develop tailor-made Quality Management programs that allow us to match customer instructions perfectly. Apart from automated translation quality assurance tools, we also utilize a wide variety of additional instruments. These include various bug trackers, query trackers, online quality management tools (like ContentQuo), and others.

We strive to ensure the quality of our work, and to improve our customers’ experience on a daily basis!

Terminology is a core translation quality category which includes a bunch of subcategories of its own. Providing a translation without terminology management is not far from playing a lottery game: maybe the translator (and the editor, afterwards) did care about terminology and its compliance/consistency or maybe they didn’t. If you think that taking a chance in this situation is not a very good idea, then you might wonder what terminology management actually is and how you can implement it in your workflow.

Generally speaking, terminology management is a process involving:

1. Acquisition of terms, i.e. finding the existing appropriate terminology sources or extracting/mining terms from the available texts (or a combination of the two);
2. Definition and translation of such terms;
3. Validating (or assigning another status) to each term;
4. Deploying the termbase (i.e. making it available for the linguists involved in a particular project) to ensure terminology consistency.

This process is cyclical as terms come and go: some emerge, some become obsolete.

At this point one might wonder: how do I achieve this? Are there any tools available? The most primal ‘tool’ is a 2-column source-target term spreadsheet (actually, there usually are more than 2 columns), that is very common among small teams and those who decided to cut financial corners for terminology expenditure. Such a spreadsheet is usually passed on as a report exported from (or sometimes to be imported to) a termbase. Each of the available translation management systems (TMS) usually features a built-in termbase. There are also third party terminology management solutions, mostly aimed at content management teams. Last but not the least are proprietary products such as MS terminology portal and similar.

We considered the above options and found all of them not 100% suitable for our needs as we work with dozens of companies around the world. Each client favors their own TMS and bilingual format, which made it quite problematic if we were to facilitate only one of the tools.

Hence, we decided to build our own tool and designed MultiQA. It is a web-based terminology management system which helps to keep glossaries up-to-date, and our translations – term-consistent and error-free. As it was tailored to our needs, the productivity peaked drastically after its deployment. We had (and still have) far fewer terminology issues and were able to organize a transparent and team-friendly collaborative workflow.