7 Ways to Get Proactive with Language Quality Management
Expert language quality assessments help you achieve better localization outcomes. Want even better results? Take a proactive approach to quality management.
When you focus on prevention rather than fixing errors later, your team can produce better translations from the start. You also make work easier for your quality assurance team at the review stage.
Check out these practical strategies to streamline your translation workflow, reduce time-consuming corrections at the end, and gain more control over quality levels.
- Define Quality Standards with All Stakeholders
What does quality mean for your localization program? It might mean different things to different stakeholders, including internal clients, translators, and your language service provider (LSP) if you use one. A clear answer from the start can avoid trouble later.
Bring everyone together early to define quality in specific terms. For example, what’s the right balance between accuracy, speed, and cost? Will different content types require different standards? Do you need to account for technical subject matter or cross-cultural concerns?
Such conversations prevent confusion and keep expectations aligned. A shared understanding of quality gives everyone a clear target from day one.
- Create a Single Source of Truth
Once you have a shared vision of quality, it’s time to translate it into guidance for both translators and reviewers. This means creating a centralized hub for style guides, terminology databases, and other reference materials.
Make sure everyone involved has easy access to this information. By setting consistent guidelines, you keep confusion and uncertainty from causing issues down the road.
Translators will produce better work if they know what standards you’ll use to evaluate quality—so try to pinpoint your metrics at the outset of localization. Consider using a formal framework like MQM-DQF to set quality goals.
- Shape Content at the Source
For the best language quality, it’s ideal to develop original source content with localization in mind. Culture-neutral idioms and simplified language, for example, can make translation easier and quality assurance less complicated.
Though you probably don’t control content creation directly, you can promote best practices by building connections with content leaders and teams. Help them understand how their choices impact translation quality and share effective examples.
When your company is expanding into new markets, it’s a great opportunity to get source content right from the beginning.
Encourage content creators to avoid cultural references that might confuse international audiences. Recommend internationalization standards for all new materials, including flexible structures for dates, currencies, and measurements.
- Deploy the Right Resources
Translators with specialized knowledge produce better results for complex topics like law, medicine, or engineering. Conversely, quality can suffer when team members work outside their expertise.
Specialized translators usually command higher rates. Nonetheless, you can avoid costly issues ahead of time by finding translators with domain-specific knowledge. If working with an LSP, find out how they approach this challenge.
Even within the same language, you might need multiple specialists to handle varied content types. For example, a Korean-language team might have one translator for legal content and another for marketing materials.
Technical skills impact quality too. Does your project require translators to use specific content management or project management software? Take these requirements into account when building your team.
- Match Technology with Your Quality Needs
The right software doesn’t just simplify workflows. It also cuts down on quality issues by helping linguists spot inconsistencies, manage terminology, and reuse previously translated material.
For the best results, don’t just go for the newest products on the market. Instead, seek out translation and QA tools that fit your process and project goals. If you use an external LSP or quality management team, they may bring their own preferred technologies to the table.
Implementation is just as important as your choice of tech. If linguists need training to make full use of quality features, make sure they get it.
- Build Transparent and Consistent Teams
When language quality reviewers assess a piece of content, it helps if they know which translator did the work. This allows reviewers to personalize feedback and adjust to changes (such as a new translator joining the team).
LSPs often limit transparency because they fear clients might bypass them and hire translators directly. If you work with an LSP, consider seeking greater clarity about who’s working on your projects.
Consistent teams matter too. By creating dedicated teams for specific content types, you help translators improve their mastery of your preferred voice, terminology, and quality requirements over time.
Many LSPs agree with this approach in theory, but in practice they often rotate translators to manage availability issues. Make sure the same team works on your projects over time, if possible. Here again, transparency is key to success.
- Build a Culture of Continuous Improvement
The ultimate guarantee of quality is to reduce recurring issues over time. Among other things, you’ll want to work with your quality team to build a strong feedback loop and ensure translators get the guidance they need.
Such feedback will be more effective, though, if you’ve prepared the ground on your end. Your team needs to excel at applying lessons learned and preventing problems from happening again.
Meet with your team regularly to discuss quality concerns and patterns. What types of issues keep happening, and why? Encourage team members to share their views and bring questions directly to you.
More broadly, strive to create an atmosphere where everyone is working together to find solutions, not pointing fingers. Your goal is not a mistake-free process but rising levels of quality over time.
A Quality-Centered Approach to Localization
A proactive approach to language quality changes how you work. Instead of just fixing problems in the review stage, you can make quality a natural result of your process.
Success means smoother workflows and fewer fire drills later. You’ll save money by avoiding unnecessary fixes. And you’ll deliver content that connects with people in all markets.
Of course, there’s no silver bullet for language quality issues.
Your translations still need careful quality review and assessment—preferably with a third-party team that includes subject-matter experts. But you can make quality management simpler and more effective by taking the right steps from the start.