FAQs
If you’d like extra reassurance about how we guarantee the quality of the translations we deliver, read on. And if you have questions, we’re here to help.
What is translation quality?
Quality is subjective. We all have our preferences. (Don’t be shy about communicating these, by the way.) But at MediLingua, 5 elements of translation quality are non-negotiable:
Consistency: The translation must be consistent as regards terminology, data and style. It must also be consistent with your previous documents and across languages.
Suitability: The translation must suit the needs of your target audience as well as your project aims.
Accuracy: The translation must mirror your original meaning as closely as possible.
Presentation: The translation must comply with the rules of spelling, grammar, punctuation, layout and abbreviations of each target language. The last thing you want is a silly mistake ruining all your hard work.
Process: A quality translation takes no shortcuts. Humans make mistakes. The simplest way to minimise mistakes is to follow a process.
What are the 5 steps in your translation workflow?
Every translation project goes through 5 steps. Here is each person’s role:
- The project manager analyses your document. They give the translator a full brief, templates and glossaries. They also explain any specific requirements you may have.
- The translator translates your document using their knowledge of writing, editing, language, culture and healthcare.
- The reviser edits the translation against your original document. They ensure it is fit for purpose and mirrors your original style, data and meaning.
- The quality assurance (QA) editor checks the translation against your glossaries and across your brand languages to make it as consistently excellent as possible.
The project manager sends you a fully revised, quality-controlled translation.
Is extra quality assurance overkill?
In our experience, every translation contains at least 1 error.
Many errors are minor. They might annoy a reader, but they won’t land you in trouble.
The errors we fix are often more serious. They happen because of confusing sentences or silly mistakes in the source text. Sometimes our translator or reviser finds a solution. In which case, our quality assurance editors incorporate the solution into all the translations in your project. Other times, none of the translators or revisers can solve the errors. When this happens, our quality assurance team mops them up directly or comes to you to troubleshoot them together.
And yes, every once and a while, we catch a major error. This is when you’re glad to have our quality assurance team keeping you safe before errors like these come back to bite you.
Just so you know, our quality assurance is best suited to big, technical, multi-language projects. This is where a single error can cause mayhem – but only if you don’t have our in-house editors on hand to sort it out in every text across every language.
What is the advantage of an in-house quality assurance team?
Because quality assurance is an in-house step, the same editors check your translation projects every time. This helps them get to know your needs, guidelines and sector. Working side-by-side also helps them troubleshoot issues together and problem-solve faster.
What does all this mean for you? Faster, consistently excellent translations and less time explaining your needs and preferences.
What does your quality assurance team do that a translator, reviser or project manager can’t do?
Translators and revisers focus on meaning and style. Project managers focus on customer queries, translator comments, quotations, feedback, testing and more.
Our quality assurance specialists perform special types of quality checks all day, every day. And by taking a macro view of your project, they identify issues in one translation, then check that it is correctly and consistently handled in all the other translations in your project.
Do you use software or AI in your translation quality process?
Yes, we use a range of tools to carry out automated checks. Obviously, these checks don’t replace the real-world knowledge of our human translators, revisers, quality assurance editors and project managers. But they speed up our process and help us identify problems.
We use AI to create custom checklists based on your guidelines and glossaries. Because AI has no direct access to your documents, strict confidentiality is maintained.