The amount of time and money you spend on quality management easily constitutes 20% of the total translation time and costs. A large part of this percentage consists of translation review (or quality review). You can reduce translation review time by streamlining the review process. In this post, we’ve listed 5 ways to do this.

 

1. Embrace a dynamic approach

Implement a translation management system in which different content profiles automatically go through different translation or review cycles and with different error tolerance thresholds. When profiling content you need to take into consideration the expected quality (good enough vs. high quality), the perishability of your content (long vs. short shelf-life), the visibility of your content (highly visible vs. low visibility), your target audience (age, cultural background, ethnicity), the communication channel (B2B, B2C, C2C) and last but not least, your budget (…well, no need to give examples here). 

When it comes to quality review, the evaluation method and error profiles (including weights and severities and the pass/fail thresholds) should be aligned with your content profiles. This dynamic approach enables you to diversify your translation workflows and to save time on the review steps where possible.

 

2. Merge cycles

Once a diversified content strategy is in place and you have finished your content profiling exercise, you can start merging cycles. Even today, many translation jobs contain multiple review cycles, some of them unnecessary or even harmful. For instance, there are companies that start the review process with pure linguistic review, followed by in-context review and finally in-country review. In each review step corrections are made but at the same time, these steps can also increase the risk of introducing new errors. Instead of having two, three or even more review cycles, try to have just one. To achieve this, you need to merge different cycles and train reviewers to consider different aspects of translation quality in one go. For example, correction and error-annotation can be done simultaneously; adequacy/fluency evaluation (scoring segments on a scale from 1-4) can be combined with fixing errors. One can also find in-country reviewers or domain experts with linguistic skills who can help save time on additional linguistic validation.

 

3. Apply sampling

As we have seen, content profiling can be used to reduce the number of cycles but it can also help shorten the review cycle by offering reviewers only a part of the translation for review (i.e. a sample). Sampling is appropriate in most evaluation scenarios, though keep in mind that the scenario in which sampling takes place has a strong influence on how the sample will be designed. We make the distinction between systematic (using knowledge of the content) and random sampling techniques. In contrast to random sampling, which provides a representative sample of the total content, systematic sampling provides an optimal selection of translated segments for review, systematically reducing the size of a project to save time and effort.