Dec 2009, 19:14, Mark Kit
What quality standards are established and used in translation industry?

Efforts have been repeatedly applied to develop and implement translation quality standards. The most significant among these are:

• European Union Standard prEN-15038
• Society of Automotive Engeneers standard SAE J2450
• ASTM F2575 – 06, Standard Guide for Quality Assurance in Translation

Neither of these standards defines translation quality characteristics nor it defines the very concept of quality.
Standard ASTM F2575, for instance, makes an explicit statement: “This guide does not provide specific metrics.”
Common shortcomings of the known standards
Any standard shall contain at least 3 components:

• Scope of application, i.e. objects or processes which it applies to
• Definition of parameters to be standadized and the allowable range of these parameters
• Indication of methods to be used for measurement of the standardized parameters

Based on our experience and studies we have conducted the following can be stated:

• No known standard defines the scope of application. The standards do not indicate what language pairs they are applicable to and it is assumed that they are good for all source-target language pairs. This “equalization” is not supported by any explanation.

• Some standards indicate parameters to be subjected to control, e.g. typos, ommissions and wrong terminology (standard J2450). However, the most important flaw – distortion of the meaning i- s not in the list of controlled parameter, neither defined the “weight” of specific types of errors. Even the entire notion of error is not standardized.
• No known standard defines methods for measurement of controlled parameters.

In summary, one can conclude that the current standards are not objective and cannot be used as tools for quality assurance.
In our company practice (Language Interface ) we use our internal norms and procedures that control two aspects:

• Maintain such a process that еnsure the highest quality of translation
• Efficient QC of the complete translation that allows to identify and eliminate errors and inaccuracies.

At the same timeLanguage Interface works on development and implementation of a versatile objective standard of quality of English-Russian and Russian-English translation.

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