A Little QA May Save Your Project
As clients rush to get translations in on tight deadlines, we as an account management team, production managers, and translator teams feel the same pressure to get your project completed in the best way possible, as quickly as possible. While some projects do not need to be as exact as others and require a lower level of translation, many of the projects that we deal with are not only on a rush deadline, but also require a great deal of attention to detail. The issue with these projects is exactly that dichotomy: the rush to meet a deadline vs. the time it requires to adequately review documents and ensure that their miniscule details are correctly translated. For this reason and in these cases, a little quality assessment may save your life, or at least your project.
For technical, financial, legal, or business documents which will be printed, shared, sent, discussed or used in any professional way, we want to make sure that your translation is on time and spot-on. The process that we use for these types of projects, time permitting, is a three-step Translation, edition, and proofreading process, with an optional QA at the end. Even though the three-step process produces high-quality results, there are cases in which the QA can work wonders. For example, I recently facilitated a project in which an MS Word doc in English was to have the translation of different phrases, words, and paragraphs immediately under the original phrases and paragraphs piecemeal, which the client would later copy and paste onto their website. What happened? The three-step process to produce the translations was excellent, but when all 3 languages of the translations were placed piecemeal underneath the phrases, there were some issues with the context of the translations which did not coincide 100% with the original. Luckily, we had a final QA phase which allowed us to identify these issues (which were not mistranslations) and deliver to the client a final version of the document quickly and accurately.
In cases of highly important documents and/or that require industry-specific terminology, the importance of a final QA cannot be overstated. Even though it may take a bit more time to produce, it’s certainly worth the extra time! Get in touch with our sales team for a quote, and for more information about a final QA.