Linguistic Quality Assessment (LQA) – How to demonstrate continuous translation quality improvement

Written by David Brett

You are a localisation manager or translation budget holder who is responsible for delivering a quality translation service for your business. You are tasked with ensuring that translations meet the needs of your business from a technical perspective and are also on point with brand and style guidelines, whilst representing good value.

You rely on ad-hoc support from in-country reviewers or target language-speaking colleagues whose primary function is not to review translations. Getting their feedback can often be time consuming and sporadic at best!

As the budget holder, you are responsible for implementing and demonstrating a continuous improvement plan for translation quality. With only ad-hoc colleague feedback you struggle to measure, manage and demonstrate this effectively.

What is LQA?

Janus LQA provides customers with an objective, consistent, metric-driven quality assessment framework. We assess translation output in three key areas:

Analytics – An assessment of the number of translation errors (mistranslations, omissions, untranslated content, grammar, inconsistency, punctuation, spelling, terminology, etc.) based on the weighted severity of the error and word count of the evaluated sample.

Adequacy – A review of how well, as a whole, the translation conveys the same meaning in the target language as in the source language.

Fluency – An assessment of how well the translation reads: does it flow as if it was written in the target language? Or does it sound like a literal translation of a source text?

The quality/suitability score of these three aspects are combined to provide a weighted overall quality score and assessment against the required expectations, resulting in a pass or fail.

Benefit

LQA scores are captured and plotted over time to display continuous improvement. This enables you to demonstrate a tangible ROI on your investment of time and budget in translation.

Example:

Would you like to find out how Janus LQA can add value to your translation objectives? If so, please get in touch by emailing d.brett@janusww.com

Head of Sales EMEA

David Brett

David began his career in localization in 2011.
David is responsible for developing the EMEA region and contributing to the company’s wider global growth ambitions.