Making Sense of Language Quality Management: How to Think Beyond QA and Boost Your Translation Results

Quality checks in localization often act as band-aids. They fix obvious errors, but they don’t reveal why defects occur or how to improve outcomes. What’s more, they miss many translation problems entirely. 

Here at Beyont, our experience leads us to strive for a deeper approach. We see the challenge of quality assurance through the lens of a comprehensive framework: language quality management (LQM).

When executed with care, LQM builds quality into every step of localization. It cuts delays, drives ongoing improvement, and avoids the cookie-cutter solutions that lead to most quality shortfalls.

Read on for our take on what it means to go beyond standard QA—so you can stop patching up quality problems and start treating their root causes. 

Is Quality Assurance Enough?

All mature localization programs include some level of language quality assurance, or LQA. But quality reviews often fall short. These gaps cause problems as localization grows more complex:

• Quality standards may be disconnected from business goals. One-size-fits-all standards rarely match different markets and objectives. Simplified metrics miss nuances that can affect customer experience, brand image, and market success. Reviews may focus on irrelevant measures for a given customer while missing what matters most to them.
• The LQA process is often an afterthought. Workflow planning comes only after projects start, leading to bottlenecks and poor coordination among teams. Quality reviewers find themselves working without the right materials. Ad hoc resourcing leads to mismatches between their skills and actual needs. 
• Teams often lack systems to prevent errors and improve over time. Without the right feedback and proactive measures, consistent gains in quality are hard to achieve. Reviewers may end up correcting the same mistakes again and again. Translators may have trouble knowing when their work misses the mark. 

If these limitations go unaddressed, you’re left open to costly delays and recurring errors. Translation quality may improve more slowly than you’d like. In the end, your localization program could leave untapped potential on the table.

The Next Level: Managing Quality from End to End

What’s the cause of these problems? They all come back to one thing: the lack of the right process aligned with your business strategy.

That’s where comprehensive LQM comes in. This is a more complete approach that connects LQA to broader goals and takes a holistic view of quality throughout the content lifecycle.

So, how does LQM make quality assurance better?

• Strategic alignment with business goals. LQM fits quality strategies and metrics to what your localization program needs to achieve. Quality frameworks adapt to the specific needs of each language, region, content type, and project. This doesn’t always mean more complex processes, just approaches that fit your actual needs.
• Comprehensive workflow planning and resource allocation: By mapping out all the steps in advance, you can develop an efficient, end-to-end workflow where everyone knows their job. Systematic resource allocation helps you choose the right language specialists and tools for each project, while developing consistent reference materials to guide their work.
• Continuous improvement and optimization: During initial setup and beyond, LQM employs responsive processes and preventive measures to achieve better outcomes over time. These may include feedback loops that help translators improve, trend analysis that helps teams spot patterns instead of repeating corrections, and upstream changes like creating source content that’s easier to localize. 

Through this more systematic approach, LQM makes your investment in quality assurance more valuable. Your translations will speak to audiences in every market you serve. You’ll finish projects faster, and deliver customer experiences that get the nuances right.

The Building Blocks of LQM

Five key pillars provide the foundation for LQM. These parts all work together to deliver a proactive, integrated, and consistent approach to ensuring translation quality.

• Proactive quality-at-source: Start by building quality into your content before translation whenever possible. Create clear standards for localization-friendly source content and work with content teams to put them in place. Such proactive steps can stop many translation issues at their origin, which cuts down on major revisions later.

• Third-party review with subject-matter experts: Independent evaluation leads to fair, honest quality judgments. LQM relies on both linguistic knowledge and domain expertise, so you’ll need subject-matter experts who match your content types and tasks. These specialists check not just if the language is correct, but if it works for your specific context and audience. 

• Linguistic quality assessment: This is a formal process for measuring and quantifying translation quality, using proven frameworks like MQM-DQF. Such an assessment enables you to make useful comparisons across markets and projects. It also allows flexibility by adjusting metrics to fit your business goals and content types. Some projects may not need this kind of fine-grained evaluation, but for others you can’t do without it. 

• Language quality governance: Strong governance removes confusion about who handles what and creates accountability throughout the quality lifecycle. Define clear processes for approvals, troubleshooting, and final decision-making. By pinpointing who’s responsible for every stage, you can establish clear ownership of quality decisions.

• Continuous quality feedback and monitoring: A well-structured, consistent feedback loop is the final cornerstone of LQM. When translators get guidance tailored to their specific challenges, they can avoid repeating errors and get better at their tasks. Track quality patterns across projects and languages to gain insights that improve your entire localization program.

The Ultimate Treatment for Language Quality

Think of LQM as an upgrade from catching errors to building quality. You’re creating a system where quality flows naturally throughout localization, with constant feedback loops driving improvement over time. 

For the best results, don’t hesitate to call on outside expertise. At Beyont, we regularly work with clients to help them craft a quality management approach that fits their goals. 

Looking to take the first steps on your own? We recommend starting simple. Review your current approach and ask: 

• Where can you improve initial planning and resource allocation? 
• How can you align your process better with business goals?
• What steps can you take to eliminate recurring issues over time?

By bolstering quality assurance through LQM, you can avert the painful cycle of temporary fixes. You’ll save valuable time, avoid many translation pitfalls, and keep your localization program running at full health.