Quality Assurance
Assurance of quality is our business! First thing you should be looking for is the quality assurance process of your language service provider. Boston Translation provides the perfect solutions that will exceed your expectations with the help of the professional linguists selected perfectly to provide the best translation services.
The Guardians of Translation Quality
How do you hire the right linguists for my project!
All language service providers apply quality assurance processes, but how the QA system is implemented is what makes all the difference. Many language service providers assign your project to unexperienced translators with insufficient cultural and subject-matter knowledge, settling for a poor- or mediocre-quality translation of the first draft and relying mainly on the ensuing editing and proofreading processes, so editors and proofreaders are bombarded with contextual, terminology, and typography mistakes making the whole translation process time-consuming and costly and might even do more harm than good to the final quality of translations.
At Boston Translation, we believe that our translators are the backbone of our best translation & localization services; we provide the best tools for translators to adhere to the industry best practices for doing things right from first time so that editors and proofreaders wouldn’t need to make drastic changes in translations, minimizing costs and avoiding costly rework.
We have stringent criteria and qualifications that translators have to meet before joining our team: for example, all translators have to be experienced with relevant academic background and proven expertise of the subject matter. All translators pass through rigorous screening, guaranteeing that only highly qualified translators are to be hired.
Thanks to our huge pool of experienced translators, our project managers assign your project only to in-country, native-speaking translators with solid expertise of the subject matter.
We owe our success to our pool of translators who act as guardians of quality. Unlike many language service providers, our process strictly requires translators to revise their own work before submitting it to editors and proofreaders.
An Error-Proof QA Process
Throughout 28 years of experience, we have built an error-proof QA module that ensures the top-quality translation/localization services we are keen on providing.
At Boston Translation, QA is an ongoing process from start to finish.
First Things First:
We start by a kick-off meeting with the production and project management teams to select the translation team that best matches the goals of your translation project, making certain all translators have the required experience and solid subject-matter expertise.
High Quality Brings the Highest Quality:
In-country, native-speaking, experienced linguists work on translations best utilizing updated Style guides and Glossary, customized Translation Memory (TM), and top-notch CAT tools, delivering high-quality translations to be submitted for revision and proofreading to reach impeccable-quality translations that are both faithful and natural.
The Quality Squad:
Your translations are thoroughly reviewed by senior native-speaking linguists (2nd eye) with in-depth knowledge of the subject matter, where translations are checked against the source text making sure translations are culturally tailored to your target locale while precisely conveying the right meaning. Revised translations are then submitted to Subject-Matter Experts (SMEs)—3rd eye–where translations are proofread ensuring terminology and industry-specific terms are accurately and naturally rendered.
The Quality Gatekeepers:
Our Total Quality Management (TQM) team acts as quality gatekeepers; they are responsible for setting QA cycles and monitoring all other departments, making sure ISO standards are applied in each step of the process. They also raise weekly, monthly, or yearly reports to the top management and communicate directly with the CRM department ensuring clients’ feedback is implemented. Our TQM team regularly checks random samples, guaranteeing the highest quality is maintained throughout the whole process.
The Quality Loop:
To guarantee the continuity of expertise and knowledge transfer in our teams, we schedule weekly and monthly internal sessions among the teams for all the existing employees and new comers sharing experience, feedback, know-hows, and industry’s updates. We have also created a Lesson-Learned Log (Treasure Box) where our team members from different departments share tips and tricks learned through experience, answer FAQs, and make lists of common mistakes and how to avoid them.
Advanced Technology for Better Quality:
We invest in state-of-the-art terminology management software and QA tools such as LTB, X-bench, QA distiller, Phoenix, Verifika, and the Mantis tool, maximizing accuracy, consistency, and cost-efficiency.
Multilevel Quality:
At Boston Translation, our meticulous QA model is multilevel, guaranteeing context, flow, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and style are correct and consistent and idioms, slang, currencies, dates, etc. are culturally customized to match your target audience’s preferences and cultural norms.
Our checklist includes but is not limited to:
Level 1
- Contextual correctness: is the translation put into the correct context?
- Mistranslations: are the ideas and messages of the source precisely conveyed?
- Additions/omissions: is there any omitted or added letter or punctuation mark?
- Terminology: are the most accurate equivalents used or are they awkward to the target audience?
- Rendering: Do graphics, text, and images display properly?
- Register: are the same level of formality and the brand tone in source text conveyed in the target text?
Level 2
- Measurements, Currencies, and dates: e.g., yards vs. meters
- Freedom of translation: are there literal translations that don’t sound natural to the target audience? Or are translations natural and they flow smoothly but don’t faithfully reflect the source text?
- Cultural: does the translation include any expressions, graphics, images, colors, or icons that are culturally inappropriate in the target locale?
- Consistency: are repeated words translated consistently when used in the same context?
- Ambiguity: is the translation clear and void of ambiguous terms and expressions?
- Style: e.g., contracts, patents, and brochures should have totally different styles.
Level 3
- Punctuation: are all commas, periods, question marks, etc. placed and displayed properly?
- Spelling: Are all the words that wouldn’t be marked by spell checkers written with the correct spelling? e.g., “where” and “were” (they sound the same and are both correct but give different meanings)
- Diacritics: Arabic, for example, is a language where diacritics are used, which can sometimes change the meaning of a word and thus of a sentence entirely if misplaced.
- Upper-/lowercase: is uppercasing used in the target language? In some languages, such as Arabic, there is no uppercase.
To ensure unrivalled quality with large volumes translated by more than one linguist, a final eye check is done by QA Team Leaders working on unifying the style and making certain style guides and glossaries are adhered to.