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The Importance of Linguistic Quality Assurance
by Terralíngua      Posted in  June 13, 2013
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Importance of Linguistic Quality AssuranceLinguistic Quality Assurance (LQA) forms an essential phase in every successful translation project, whether it is document translation or website translation. Clients deserve and expect high-quality language translation for their projects. Errors in the final translation can affect the customer’s confidence in the service vendor’s professionalism and the integrity of their project. Therefore, it is imperative for service providers to do the projects without any linguistic mistakes.

LQA Teams

The translation or localization service provider you choose will have a linguistic quality assurance team on their list of professionals. The service provider should ensure that the proofreader and the linguistic editor who worked on the project during the editing and quality assurance are not the same ones who did the original translation. Some linguists may try to perform self copy editing and proofreading. This does not guarantee a high-quality content for the customer.

Translation and editing are two steps done by different linguists. In this process, an editor is tasked with checking and proofreading the original content from the translator for accuracy and completeness. Next comes the linguistic quality assurance process, which forms the final quality checking step. Service providers should implement the linguistic quality assurance process, which reviews the translated content for linguistic, industry, and technical correctness. This will ensure that the customer has a successful and perfect translation delivered to him in all multimedia, software localization, website, and document projects.

During the linguistic quality assurance process, an expert ensures that the final transcript is accurate technically, that is it should have appropriate tense, proper collocations/word use, no spelling errors, proper grammatical structure, and style as well as grammar consistency.

Purpose of Linguistic Quality Assurance

The linguistic quality assurance step is also done to review the translation for correct usage of linguistic phrasing such as terminology, cultural accuracy, idiomatic expressions, and local terms. Doing this ensures that the final work is a perfect rendition for target markets, and that it also seems as natural to the audience in the target locale as the source content did to the original audience. Linguistic quality assurance also makes sure that the final content does not seem like an awkward and stilted literal translation.

Lastly, the LQA phase reviews the translated file for industrial accuracy, whether the content has corresponding industrial jargon or terminology of any specific subject. For instance, different industries like hospitality, technology, food, and so on have industry-specific terminologies that will have to be inducted into the final content to make it more compatible with the target audience.

Skills Desired in LQA Professionals

A linguistic quality assurance professional is generally expected to have the following skills:

English Proficiency: Testing the localized products needs a strong understand of the original language, which often is English.

Target Language Proficiency: An LQA tester should have a strong base in the target language. The testers not only have to be experts in the target language, but also remain up–to-date in the language.

Computer Knowledge: Testers generally have to report defects, test product functionality, or take screenshots of the final product. Proficiency in operating computers ensures that the LQA tester does not get stuck with simple troubleshooting tasks.

Internet Skills: Verifying texts and specific terminologies, as well as searching for common expressions and terms requires solid research skills and also common sense. An expert tester is one who can pay attention to details and find exactly what he or she is looking for.

When searching for a localization service provider, you should look for someone who is as committed to providing careful localization for the products as you are. Linguistic quality assurance should be done at every stage of the project so as to ensure that the vendor meets the expectations for the final product or service.

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