What’s Your Best Option for Language Quality Management? A Brief Guide for Localization Leaders
Wondering what third-party language quality management (LQM) can do for your localization program? If you think quality reviews are one-size-fits-all, the full range of possibilities may surprise you.
A skilled LQM provider can tailor strategies to meet many objectives, from providing translators with better feedback to improving AI models. They can also help you customize your approach to navigate the tricky balance between depth, speed, and cost.
Before you make any decisions, it’s helpful to know the full range of approaches at your disposal. Here’s a quick guide for localization leaders seeking the best fit for their goals.
Improve Day-to-Day Translation Quality
Many organizations turn to LQM to improve everyday localization quality, whether they use internal translators or a language service provider (LSP). Your quality management provider can craft an approach to match your priorities: quality, speed, or budget.
Comprehensive quality assessment
This is the gold standard when quality is non-negotiable—for example, if you’re translating legal guidance, technical documentation, or high-stakes marketing campaigns.
In a comprehensive assessment, subject-matter experts use customized metrics to evaluate your translations and provide fine-grained quality scores.
Detailed feedback loops, trend reporting, and analysis help you boost quality over time. Through statistical sampling, your provider can adjust the scope of review to match your budget and timeline.
Expedited quality reviews
For less exacting projects, your LQM provider may be able to streamline the process. For instance, reviewers may perform simple pass-fail assessments instead of detailed scoring and analysis.
This type of assessment can save time and money upfront. However, it also limits the value of the feedback you receive. Consider using such reviews selectively for less mission-critical materials, rather than across your entire localization program.
Automated quality screening
As a budget-friendly solution, your language quality provider could use AI systems to screen content and flag selected pieces for human review. This approach can reduce labor costs when you’re working with high volumes.
Still, AI may miss context-dependent quality issues that humans catch easily. Automated screening also requires careful setup and the right content formatting to work smoothly. So it’s not a silver bullet.
Get More Out of Machine Translation and AI
Automation brings efficiency, but even the most sophisticated systems can miss nuances that human experts would catch. Here are examples of how third-party LQM can improve your machine translations and AI tools.
Human review and feedback for AI models
If you rely heavily on machine translation, third-party quality management can make your output more natural and effective.
Experienced quality specialists offer more than just post-editing. Through detailed assessments, they can provide tailored feedback to train and improve your AI models. They can also help you identify the right quality metrics and develop effective workflows for combining AI with human review.
AI quality testing and comparison
Different translation engines may work better or worse with your specific content. To help you arrive at the right choice, your LQM provider can test how well multiple different systems handle your material.
Subject-matter experts score each result, and your provider averages their scores to see which tool works best. This testing costs money upfront, but you save over time with more effective translations and less editing.
AI product tagging and categorization
AI systems can speed up product tagging for online stores and ecommerce apps. But these tools can also make mistakes that complicate searches and frustrate shoppers.
A third-party LQM team can help you ensure high-quality categorization. Human reviewers check the AI-generated product tags and make sure they work properly for all languages you use. That way, shoppers in every market get the same seamless experience.
Enhance Localized User Experiences
Standard translation reviews fall short when your content appears in actual products. Through third-party quality testing, you can deliver a superior experience to users in any language.
UX quality testing for digital products
Software, apps, and complex websites all need special attention. Your quality management provider can perform specialized testing to see how translations affect usability, navigation, and the overall user experience.
UX quality testing goes beyond linguistic reviews with functional testing, automatic bug tracking, and more. Native speakers ensure all content makes sense in context, verify all features work in the target languages, and root out translation flaws that could lead users astray.
In-person product testing
Some products are too complex or interactive to test remotely. If so, your quality management provider can send reviewers to test translations in person with the actual product.
In-person testing costs more because of labor time and travel. Even so, it may be vital for products that need to work intuitively and have strict safety requirements. Think vehicle interfaces or industrial machinery controls.
Grow Your Internal QA Capabilities
Outsourcing is often cost-effective. But it can also be helpful to build internal systems for language quality assurance. This is especially valuable if you handle high translation volumes or want more control over your process.
A third-party quality management provider can provide many types of technical support:
- Training team members on quality standards and best practices
- Creating custom quality metrics and reference materials
- Evaluating and selecting QA tools
- Building quality processes for new programs
- Setting up or refining workflows to fit your business needs
By working with third-party LQM specialists, you can build the right systems with less trial and error. Continue to outsource whatever activities make sense, and call on your provider for help when you need extra capacity.
What’s the Right Choice for Your Language Quality Program?
Whatever your localization goals, you can find the right approach to meet your language quality needs.
The right strategy will help you balance quality with speed and budget requirements. Language quality specialists can customize methods for specific challenges like testing user experiences or optimizing AI outputs.
When choosing a third-party LQM provider, look to understand how they will approach your unique situation. Seasoned quality experts will know what questions to ask and can develop solutions for different scenarios—so your language quality program can take you wherever you need to go.