Multilingual quality assurance

Planet Languages greatly values client feedback. It is an opportunity to further fine-tune our services to more closely match your requirements. By carefully reviewing and meticulously analysing the feedback, we establish trends and patterns that help us to continually improve our service.

Our analysis of such patterns shows that certain quality flaws in translations stem from the source text.

  • Inconsistencies
  • Factual inaccuracies
  • Misspelt names
  • Figures and dates

…are all points that can end up being reproduced in your multilingual content.

It is therefore crucial that the first step of multilingual quality assurance should take place before translation even starts, by taking the time to check the source text carefully and ensuring that everything is correct and consistent with your previous content and corporate terminology before placing it for translation.

Our experienced project managers can also identify and provide feedback on areas of the source text that may need to be revised, as a high-quality source text saves considerable time in the long run and gives linguists the best opportunity to craft a high-quality translation.

Benefits

Once the source text has been optimised, our Quality Assurance tools help us ensure that your multilingual content is completed to the same high level as your source text:

Full integration of QA tools with the translation environment
Connectivity with Translation Memories and glossaries for comprehensive checks
Possibility for devising hundreds of custom client-specific QA workflows, based on the requirements of each project
Easy export of colour-coded QA reports based on error category for further analysis of areas that may need to be addressed

Some of the main features of our automated QA technology:

Terminology

  • check for consistent use of terminology with integrated glossaries
  • warn if forbidden terms are used

Consistency

  • identify duplicate words
  • verify that identical segments are translated consistently
  • ensure consistency with previously translated content by comparing the translations against the approved translation memory

Length

  • ensure that the translation does not go over the allowed character count
  • check the length of the translation in proportion to the source

Numbers

  • ensure that all numbers present in the source appear in the translation and vice versa
  • check that the correct format was used for numbers (e.g. 12,345.67 vs. 12.345,67)

Punctuation

  • check for missing brackets, quotation marks and apostrophes
  • verify the correct use of spaces before and after punctuation marks
  • ensure consistency of punctuation in the source and target

Spaces, capitals, characters

  • detect double whitespace characters or extra spaces
  • ensure consistency of initial capitalisation in source and target
  • warn if forbidden characters appear in the translation

Spelling and grammar

  • generate warnings for spelling errors
  • generate warnings for grammar errors

Formatting

  • check that any formatting in the source text was preserved in the translation, such as bold, italic and underline

Other

  • warn if any sentences have been left out
  • warn if the translation is identical to the source