Speaker 1: In this video, I'm going to give you a simple, sure-fired method for assessing translation quality. It's a process we've been using for years, and it works great. To get there, we first need to be clear what we mean by translation quality. We'll identify the four key components to it and the questions we need to ask to assess these. Then we'll wrap those questions up into our proven translation review process and show you how it works in practice. And to finish off, I'll give you three key tips to help you get better translation quality assessment outcomes. I'm Dennis Brown, and our company has been providing a wide range of language translation services for over 20 years. Keep watching. Here's what we mean by a high-quality translation. It's one that captures the meaning of the original text, has appropriate wording, doesn't have any mistakes, and is consistent throughout. Now, this definition isn't meant to cover every possible use clients may have for a translation. Instead, it's designed to be functional. It's a reliable framework reviewers can use to assess translation quality across most business translation needs. Our definition gives us the four key parameters to translation quality and the standards that need to be met to be high-quality. Let's flesh out what these mean in practice. A high-quality translation will express the meaning contained in the source text and only that meaning. In other words, it won't omit, alter, or add any meaning. This is what we typically mean when we say a translation is accurate. Mostly, this is easy to judge. It's generally obvious if some meaning has been missed, or something extra has been added, or if the translation sees something different to the original. But not always. That's because there are grey areas, and judging equivalents of meaning is somewhat subjective and often a value judgment. So what a reviewer might see as a difference, the translator may not. People will sometimes disagree on both the extent of any differences and their importance. Now this is best seen as different viewpoints or opinions, rather than one person being right and the other wrong. They'll probably both have valid reasons for seeing things as they do. There's a lot more information in our blog article on what constitutes a difference and what doesn't, on the trade-off between accuracy and natural wording, and how to handle those grey areas. Check it out if you're interested. Fortunately though, any differences of opinion should be few and far between. Just the odd phrase here and there, and typically these will involve subtle shades of meaning, rather than the essential message of the text. This gives us the first of our four translation quality assessment questions. Does the translation capture the meaning of the original? Our second parameter is wording, or quality of expression. We've said a high quality translation will be appropriately worded, so we need to define what that means. Well, it involves three aspects, naturalness, ambiguity, and register in style. Firstly, a high quality translation will use natural sounding language, flow nicely, and be easy to understand. In other words, there won't be any awkward parts. We call this good wording, high quality of expression, or fluency. Native speakers will generally agree on what's very good expression, what's clearly poor wording, and most of what falls in between. But again, not everything. Phrasing that's well worded to one linguist may seem a little clunky to another. This shouldn't be a surprise though, because we all develop certain connotations around words and expressions. We have preferred ways of saying things, and other phrasing that we like less. Our life experiences are different, and our preferences reflect that. In practice, this means one linguist may consider some phrasing a little unnatural, that someone else thinks is perfectly fine. Again, it's not a matter of black and white, right or wrong, but rather reflections of individual wording preferences. Occasional differences in viewpoint like this are natural, and to be expected. The second aspect of quality of wording is ambiguity. Something is ambiguous if it can be understood in different ways. For example, there are several possible interpretations of this sentence, depending on who you think is on the hill, and if you think the telescope is being used, or is simply installed on the hill. Generally, we don't want a translation to be ambiguous, because a reader might understand it in a way that wasn't intended, and especially not if the original text wasn't ambiguous, and had a single, clear meaning. However, there are exceptions. Sometimes ambiguity is intentional, and writers want their text open to different interpretations. But for most business texts, clients want their meaning to be crystal clear, so the translation should reflect that, and not introduce ambiguities. The third aspect of quality of wording is register and style. Register refers to the degree of formality or informality of vocabulary and phrasing. Here are some examples of more formal words, and their more casual and informal equivalents. Related to this is tone. That's the feelings, emotions, or attitude conveyed by the words we use. Mostly, we'll want a translation to have similar tone and formality to the original. Style comprises word choice and sentence and paragraph structure. It's tempting to say a translation should have the same style as the original, but this won't always be the case. Languages and cultures sometimes use quite different styles for the same situation. For example, when dealing with sensitive subjects, it's better to say the translation should use a style that's appropriate for the intended purpose or function of the text in that language. Here's our key question covering quality of expression. Does the translation read like it should? Our third criterion is the easy one, mistakes. Obviously, a high quality translation won't have any. Now, we're not talking about translation mistakes here, that is, differences in meaning. Remember, these came under our first criterion. Rather, we're referring to technical areas, typos, punctuation, spelling, grammar. There are accepted rules for these, of course, so this is an objective rather than subjective criterion, which means we should all agree on what's a mistake and what isn't. And they're easy to identify. They'll stand out like a sore thumb to experienced reviewers, even when they're not looking for them. Plus, the spell checkers and other tools translators use will quickly identify most of them. So our third question is a simple one. Are there any grammar or spelling mistakes? For our last parameter, our definition says a high quality translation will be internally consistent. That means firstly in vocabulary, where we'd expect terms that are repeated in the original text to be translated in the same way throughout the translation. Not doing this could confuse the reader. We'd also expect consistency of layout and formatting. This means fonts, font sizes, indents, spacing, capitalization, etc. etc. Thirdly, we'd expect consistency of style and register. However, there are exceptions to this, which I won't cover here, but I explain in our blog article. This gives us our final question. Has the translation handled everything consistently? So we've now identified the four questions we need to ask to assess a translation's quality, but how exactly do we go about answering these in practice? Well, it's too demanding to keep all four questions in mind and check for them at the same time. So we break the task up into three distinct steps. In step one, we focus solely on meaning with no other distractions. We want to know if all meaning is being correctly carried over into the translation with nothing extra added and nothing omitted. This means systematically comparing the translation against the original phrase by phrase or sentence by sentence. It's much more effective to do this from hard copies because things are too easily missed on screen. Best practice is to place the two texts side by side, covered up, and uncover matching sections only when we're working on them. This keeps the focus solely on the text being compared and minimizes distractions. It's also essential to work with short chunks of text of seven to ten words at a time. Anything longer is hard to retain in short-term memory, so it's easier to miss something. And each chunk of text should be a discrete and complete unit of meaning. That's because complete ideas are easier to remember than incomplete ones. Now, reviewing for accuracy of meaning is mentally demanding, and it takes intense concentration, which is exactly why we look at meaning and nothing else in the step. It's way more effective than trying to concentrate on multiple things at once. There's a bonus to this though. Because of the intense focus at phrase and word level, reviewers also tend to automatically notice any typos, grammar mistakes, and inconsistency in vocabulary in this step. Step two assesses the translation's quality of expression and consistency of wording and style. Now, of course, you'll need to be a native speaker of the language for this. The reviewer simply reads through the translation looking for anything that jars, seems unnatural, or is hard to follow, and anything that makes them pause should be reviewed. Now, seasoned reviewers will automatically pick up inconsistent vocab and style during this read-through, but less experienced reviewers may not, and they'll need an additional pass through the translation looking specifically at how key vocabulary is handled. In our third step, the reviewer runs an eye over formatting and layout to make sure everything is neat and consistent. They'll also make sure there are no spelling or grammar errors, generally using the spell check available in most programs. They may also check name spellings, dates, and numbers, because these are a common source of error. So that's our three-step method for assessing translation quality. We found it remarkably effective across the majority of business translation needs. There are two reasons it works so well. Firstly, it covers all the key components of translation quality, and secondly, it breaks a rather complex task down into manageable steps. The key is that each step looks at something different and doesn't overload the brain trying to review multiple things at once. We think all reviewers should follow this process and recommend clients use it for their work. To finish, here are three key tips to help you get better translation quality assessment outcomes. Firstly, use experienced personnel for both your translation and in your review process. Why? Because an experienced translator should automatically do a good job, and an experienced reviewer will be less likely to want to make changes that others don't see as necessary. Secondly, avoid getting embroiled in discussions over what is and isn't a mistake or what is or isn't good wording. These discussions seldom reach a definite conclusion as they're often a matter of opinion, and they can take up a lot of your time. Finally, be crystal clear on who has final say on the translation wording. If that's the reviewer, we suggest they simply make any changes they think necessary. And if it's the translator, then the reviewer should flag any queries and suggestions for the translator to consider. Now make sure you head over to our blog article for more information and a great summary pdf you can download to help keep your review process on track, and we've got many more practical business translation articles you'll find useful. If you like this video, please give us a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel. Thanks for watching.