Your brand translates billions of words and thousands of materials for your market at scale. However, the process can be costly, and you may also miss the details that matter for your audience.
Bad formatting or a subtle syntax error can make a big difference and may negatively impact your brand identity and communication.
Sometimes, the mistake is so strong that you get locals’ attention for the wrong reason. For example, when American Airlines wanted to build a campaign for luxury experiences, they translated “Fly in leather” to “Vuela en cuero” for their Mexican audience. The translation technically meant the same thing, but due to linguistic and cultural differences, it also meant something else—"Fly naked." We can assure you that American and its local audience did not have that in mind.
The translation confused customers and made them laugh when it should have made them see the brand as a premium choice. This mistake cost American its investment in the campaign and set its brand perception back.
The good news is that translation quality control can enforce parameters that prevent similar blunders. Your translation process can place native audience perceptions at the center of your localization plan.
But first, let's define translation quality control and then dive into how you can implement it in your localization plan. With a better strategy, you can reach more markets and position your brand for growth.
What is translation quality control?
Translation quality control typically happens toward the end of a translation project and ensures that content meets local audiences' standards for localization. The quality verification process confirms that translations are accurate, contain no typos or errors, are consistent, and are relevant to the cultural context.
Teams and technology identify and correct translation errors, looking for inconsistencies and barriers to effective communication. This process may require comparing the source text to the translated version, checking for grammar, spelling, or punctuation errors, and ensuring readability within the translation.
As we learned from the American Airlines example, communicating with the proper context and accuracy is highly important for your brand’s messaging.
Teams should ensure that their practices keep essential translation factors in mind. These practices include:
- Checking that the colors, symbols, and images you use convey the same meaning
- Proofreading and reviewing the translated text for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors
- Verifying that tone and word choice are appropriate for the subject
- Confirming that translations properly convey your source text’s meaning
- Evaluating the types of emotions that your translated message will illicit
- Ensuring that you correctly implement or avoid elements that involve dialect, idioms, taboos, and critical cultural nuances
- Reviewing formatting like dates, numbers, and similar elements to ensure correct organization
- Training teams to use consistent and appropriate terminology
- Investing in technology and translation memory (TM) to automate these preferences for the future
Building a foundation for automating translation quality control
As you build a better and more automated solution, consider these three steps to level up your process:
1. Identify the use cases you want to improve
Evaluate your current translation process and review the cultures and languages you target, as well as how some of your output may fall short of your goals.
When you’re translating in different languages, you’ll want to ensure that you develop high-quality translated text with correct spelling, syntax, formatting, and similar quality standards. A native audience member will spot these mistakes immediately, and you’ll lose credibility.
Once you've analyzed your situation and identified some of the reasons why your current translation quality control may be lower than your expectations, you can start your search for a better solution.
2. Evaluate your scope and budget
Localization can be costly, especially if you depend on a fully human solution or a platform that only provides some automation. Thankfully, modern technologies avoid many of these high costs, which puts you in a better position by allowing you to determine your budget and strategy based on growth and scalability.
Find out how many multilingual target audiences you want to serve and how much you can spend on better quality. A healthy localization strategy that focuses on more accurate translations will improve your communication with audiences and produce better results. You can adjust your growth-focused budget accordingly as you increase sales or conversions with high-quality translations.
3. Choose the right platform and team
Finally, decide on the company you want to partner with. Translating your content across all markets and materials is a daunting task that is prone to inaccuracies, so you’ll want to choose a platform with an all-in-one solution so nothing in your localization pipeline falls through the cracks.
Find a platform that helps you translate and manage your content and automate and optimize the translation process for faster market growth and expansion.
Implementing automated translation quality control
Once you’ve checked all the above essentials to build a strong foundation, it’s time to implement your strategy. You should pick a solution that can implement top translation quality control.
The tool you choose should have a robust track record that evaluates translations’ quality and accuracy against the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework.
While the industry average MQM score for machine translation is often 89–90%, Smartling’s solution pushes brands to the next level with 90%+ scores across the board in all languages. Plus, Smartling scores 98%+ when utilizing AI-powered human translation.
Read our MQM whitepaper to learn more.
When you partner with a solution like Smartling, you’ll benefit from the top translation management solution in the market and guarantee that translations are of the highest quality that native translators can offer.
Watch our episode, “Understanding MQM methodology and translation quality,” for more information on MQM.
Techniques to enhance accuracy
There are two services that companies should consider to improve their translation quality control: managed services and translation services.
By partnering with a company that provides professionally managed services, brands can focus on their growth while outsourcing localization management to expert linguists like Smartling’s.
Managed services extend your localization team with efficient services that help you meet demanding business goals. You don't have to worry about the challenges of scaling and extending your market reach—managed services handle all aspects of translation projects.
On the other hand, some companies are only looking for translation services. Maybe they have a localization team and process that they are happy with. Their results are up to their quality standards, and they can handle the scope. But they need help creating expert translations.
Translation services providers help brands get to market faster with high-quality translated content. Smartling's network of 100% native-speaking translators offers best-in-class contextual translations. You’ll receive accurate translated content that will help you connect with audiences like a native.
Tips for preserving creativity without losing quality
Context is everything, especially as you invest in technology, TM and glossaries, and other linguistic components in your processes. That’s why brands often benefit from human translation services.
Adopting an AI-powered human translation process provides the best of both worlds. Utilizing technology to automate translations helps you save on translation costs and improves time to market, and a human review allows for high-quality, localized results. Human translators know how to connect with your customers like native speakers, and their expertise will help you improve translations.
Additionally, when you use a state-of-the-art localization tool like Smartling, these expert decisions feed into your translation management system so future translations can automatically incorporate these on-brand, culturally accurate, improved translations.
Smartling’s commitment to translation quality control
Smartling quality guarantee ensures 100% customer satisfaction with zero risk. (Source)
Smartling's translation services, localization services, and automated translation technologies offer the best-in-class solution for effective translation quality control. Using them, you can better communicate with your multilingual audiences and expand into new markets, knowing that your translations are correct, meet nuances, and spur customers to take action.
Transform your translation quality control process to change foreign experiences to native ones. Watch our five-minute demo now to experience Smartling's powerful potential to transform your translation output.
