The Guide to Translation and Localization: Quality Assurance

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The Guide to Translation and Localization: Quality Assurance - How to be Certain You Got it Right

By Lingo Systems,
Portland, OR, U.S.A.

info [at] lingosys . com
www.lingosys.com

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Chapter 8: Quality Assurance - How to be Certain You Got It Right!

How many times have you laughed over incomprehensible instructions for connecting a new audio system or assembling a new toy for your child? Intuitively most consumers realize they are reading a poor translation. But ask yourself: Do you want your customers laughing over something you produced? Most companies seem to understand that the quality of their websites, documentation, and software is extremely important in achieving product acceptance. Time and again we see companies delay projects for weeks while they "wordsmith" their message to get it "just right." When it comes time to translate that message for their foreign markets, however, they choose the cheapest option available. If you are investing in the localization of your product, you should want that product to meet the high-quality expectations of your target audience... wherever they may be. You should also want your product to reflect your carefully crafted image in every marketplace.

Barbara Bonnema

QA Supervisor

As a student at the "Hogeschool voorTolk/ Vertaler" (4-year college for Interpretation & Translation in the Netherlands), I could have never imagined that I would one day end up here at Lingo Systems as the Quality Assurance Supervisor. Even though I don't often have the opportunity for Dutch translation anymore, I thoroughly enjoy working with other people's translations in a great variety of languages and, in the process, helping to deliver a high-quality product to our clients.

Think Quality from the Start

To maximize quality, consider reviewing your source content and products to determine whether they are "localization-ready" This step begins even before the translation, while your materials are still in development! This review identifies possible issues that may affect successful localization. You are probably familiar with the concept of "internationalizing" software (preparing software so that it can be easily localized in the future). We encourage you to apply that same idea to all of your products, including documentation. In our experience, this important step is often overlooked during documentation development, resulting in timelines that compromise a thorough internationalization prior to commencing the project.

To help make your documentation suitable for localization, your localization vendor should offer to review or "clean up" your English documentation. An English document that is grammatically correct and free from inconsistencies in terminology greatly facilitates the translation process. Similarly, consistent formatting style (see Chapter 10, Writing for Localization) greatly improves the document localization process. Keep in mind that if you wait until after the translation process is completed, a poorly formatted paragraph will require fixing in each language. If you review and clean up the document before translation begins, the poorly formatted paragraph only needs to be repaired once!

Thinking about your need for quality and other document localization issues early in the process will dramatically improve your final product. The more thought you put into preparing your products for localization, the more likely you will be to achieve higher quality, lower costs, and shorter timelines.

Quality Assurance

Quality standards are subjective and can vary depending on the use of the final product. With consumer products, you may have exacting quality standards, whereas an in-house training course may have more relaxed quality requirements. The primary Quality Assurance (QA) standards for localized materials are as follows:

1) Translation quality: Is the source effectively translated into each language?

2) Visual review: Does the document conform to the "look and feel" of the original source materials?

3) Functional testing: Does your software, website, or on-screen display function properly in the localized technical environment?

Translation Quality

Factors that impact linguistic quality include:

1) Are professionals or non-professionals performing the translation?

2) How many linguistic steps are used.. .one, two, or three?

3) Is there an in-country review?

4) What supplementary tools - style guidelines, glossary, and terminology list - are used to help complete the translation?

A comprehensive discussion of these topics is presented in Chapter 5. Each is an important part of the QA process. For example, performing additional linguistic steps to copyedit the work of a translator, or proofread the draft output for consistency and flow of language, will improve quality and ensure accuracy. Similarly, utilizing your own in-country personnel or representatives to review the final deliverable is another important QA procedure that will add to the overall quality of your translated product.

At Lingo Systems, we endorse each of these steps and recommend that Quality Assurance Specialists verify that the linguists have consistently used the correct terminology and styles.

Visual Review

Once the formal translation process has been completed, the Quality Assurance process continues in different forms, depending on the nature of your project. If your project includes printed materials, the QA specialists perform visual validation to ensure that everything in the translated document matches the source document. Among the items typically validated are:

1) Completed translation: all items that should be translated are translated, and those that should remain in the source language are not translated,

2) Consistent font type, style, and size,

3) Correct placement and size of graphics,

4) Graphic content: no "clipping" of graphic or text elements,

Jennifer Polis

QA Specialist

Ever since I was a little girl, I've loved reading the English language and seeing how words fit together. Oddly, I was the only one in school who thought diagramming sentences and conjugating verbs was cool. Now that I'm all grown up (somewhat) and working at Lingo Systems, I've come to appreciate the visual cues of many other languages as well. This has worked out wonderfully, since the actual speaking part has always stumped me.

5) Page flow and page numbering match the source document,

6) Cross-references between text and the table of contents, indices, internal references, screen captures, and/or graphic caption text, and

7) Text indentation and alignment.

This list can expand considerably and is normally customized for each project, based on input from the client. To help your vendor develop quality guidelines, provide them with any information that can aid the translation and QA steps early in the localization process. Some examples of helpful information to provide to your vendor include:

1) Terms and names that remain in English,

2) A list of part numbers for your products,

3) Measurement units and conversions used in your document (inches/cm, pounds/grams, Celsius/Fahrenheit, etc.), and

4) Local contact information for each language (phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses, website URLs, etc.).

Functional Testing

Online Documentation

As with your printed documentation, all online documentation should be validated in a QA review. The two main online documentation formats in use today, PDF files and HTML files, also require functional testing. This procedure will confirm that the functionality of the PDF or HTML files (e.g., bookmarks, hyperlinks, internal cross-references, etc.) work as intended.

These tests, which are ideally performed by your localization vendor, usually require testing on computers running native operating systems to ensure that the functionality and character displays are correct. Typically, the files are checked for:

1) Compatibility with native operating systems,

2) Correct display of fonts and graphics using the appropriate browser or reader,

3) Correct functioning of hyperlinks, and

4) Clear printing of pages.

This list may be customized with other items, depending upon any advanced features that may be added to the PDF or HTML files.

Software and other User Interfaces (GUI) also require a thorough QA review. This testing process is similar to PDF and HTML testing. Software should be checked on native operating systems to ensure that character encoding and fonts are correct and that any text expansion does not result in truncated text strings. In addition, hot keys and keyboard shortcuts need testing to ensure there are no conflicts and that the keys used actually appear on the local keyboard.

Finally the application needs to be tested to ensure that the localization process did not introduce any "bugs" (errors) into the software. Typically software goes through a full regression test to make sure that all areas of the software perform as intended. As with HTML and PDF testing, the actual test may be customized to suit a specific need or client request.

A full discussion on testing and integration can be found in Chapter 17.

Summary

When selecting a localization vendor, look for a partner who cares as much as you do about carefully localizing your product in different languages. A good way to determine this is to inquire about their QA procedures. There are many translators and translation companies in the marketplace, but each one has different quality standards for their work. Quality Assurance steps must be performed at each stage of a project in order for a localization vendor to meet your expectations for the final product.

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