Linguistic Quality Assurance
Linguistic Quality Assurance (LQA) is a comprehensive, multi-level process that includes a large number of processes and factors that all aim to measure, control and increase the linguistic quality of any text.
Sometimes you may have a translated text, or even an original one, and you need some expert help regarding the quality of that text. You may have a text that is written by someone who is a specialized expert in some field, yet not a professional linguist. You may also have a text translated by a translator or another language service provider and you need a 3rd party to perform a professional and honest evaluation on your behalf, so that you could have a clear image on the quality of work you receive from your vendors.
You may need to evaluate the text, spot the errors, and correct them. In some other cases, you may also need it to align a new translation to your perilously translated content, which is called “History Translations”. You may also need to make limited editing to an updated document, spotting newly updated parts only. This means saving both money and time.
LQA could be performed on many different levels, according to your needs, time space, budget, etc. Such levels could vary from revision, which means comparing translation to the original text to make sure the text was correctly translated in terms of meaning, context, syntax, etc. You might also need proofreading, which mainly focuses on the linguistic errors in the translated text, like grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.
In some other cases, you may need an expert eye to check the specialist terminology and jargon used in the document in order to make sure they were accurately chosen and put in place. Terminology is considered as one of the most challenging linguistic aspects when handling a translation of a document, since it needs a specialist experience, scientific methodology and careful attention; among many other rare skills. You need to make sure the correct term was chosen and also put in place. You need to make sure also that the same term was used across the whole document, or all your multiple, connected documents; an aspect that is called “Consistency”. Sometimes, when translating from one language to another, the specialist term does not even have an approved or a widely-used translation in the target language. Hence, you need to create a translation for the term in the target language from scratch, which is a separate process called “Terminology Coinage”.
All these factors fall within a big process called “Terminology Management”. Such process, that is very specialized, complicated, and scientific. It needs a very rare knowledge and methodology which are not available or accessible to everyone. In addition to that, your content may also need different types of editing, like editing the style of writing used in order to make it of a better quality, more authentic, more creative, more relevant to target audience, etc.
In Ultra Localize, we perform our own analysis on the content according to your requirements and tell you just what you need to reach the highest quality, in the shortest time, and at the lowest cost.