Checking the translation Quality (LQA Method) Revised

Linguistic Quality Assurance (LQA) is literally interpreted as a linguistic quality control, or more figuratively, an expert quality translation assessment. LQA is a widely used process in the translation industry, demonstrating rapid development and leading to a significant increase in demand in recent years.

LQA implies the involvement of a third-party translation service provider to carry out an expert quality assessment of the finished translation on the basis of a set of criteria. The criteria system tends to differ in many ways. Different types of language service providers integrate their unique approaches.

 

The core meaning of the LQA system is as follows:

1. Firstly, a randomly determined text fragment is submitted for LQA expertise (typically, a certain proportion of the total text is taken for examination). The analysis of several text fragments is applicable for translations performed by a group of independent language service providers.

2. Furthermore, the LQA specialist conducts detailed proofreading and review of the target text and comments on errors and inaccuracies in a separate database. This could be any bug tracking system used internally in a company, an Excel spreadsheet, screenshots with respect to the software translations, or comments in a Word file.

3. An examination of the results makes it possible to analyze the number of errors contained in the whole document and to categorize them. Quality standards may be distinct: stylistic errors basically have no significant impact, while semantic errors change the meaning of the text completely and are regarded as egregious errors (“fatal errors”).

4. Based on the review, a judgement of the translation quality may be provided.

 

The LQA system was adopted by most of the largest companies worldwide and for good reason. LQA enables a content owner to control their translation providers and the quality of their services. The content owner may easily change the provider or request additional proofreading in the case of an unsatisfactory translation result.