Quality Assurance and Revision in Translation

How do you decide whether a translation is good? The first question is what you are even assessing, the process behind the work or the finished text it produces.

When a steady set of standardized steps is planned, carried out, tracked, and checked across the whole job, the delivered text tends to come out stronger.

Quality Assurance and Revision in Translation

Quality assurance, or QA, is the full set of steps everyone in a translation operation follows before, during, and after the work to confirm that the client's quality goals are actually reached. Put plainly, translation QA covers steps that protect:

• Service quality, which comes from following the agreed work rules, handling client complaints the right way, and storing and keeping copies of completed jobs.
• The quality of the deliverable itself, which depends on meeting requirements for presentation, layout, formatting, and the agreed delivery date.
• The quality of the translation, measured by whether the client ends up satisfied.

As that definition shows, several different steps can get you to translation QA. Here, a step means a defined way of carrying out an activity, the sense used in ISO 8402: 1994.

One thing to flag: this grouping leaves out the post-editing of translations, since that step has its own character. What it assesses is the output of machine translation rather than human work. It is also worth stressing that translation QA mainly exists to head off trouble against the client's quality goals, while the revision practices noted above support quality assurance by catching problems during the work or in the finished target text (TL). They simply do it with their own methods, aims, and audiences. So when you set up a translation QA system, you have to settle two things: what you are assessing (the service itself, the process, or the TL as the physical result), and what criteria and steps you will use to apply those criteria.

On the question of what gets assessed, keep in mind that ISO 17100:2015 and EN 15038:2006 are built mainly around how TSPs deliver translation services. Because of that, meeting every requirement and running the work and management steps these standards call for, across the whole job, still does not promise a full one hundred percent guarantee of the TL's quality as a finished product, given how many different factors feed into judging it.

The sections that follow stay focused on one of those revision practices, revision itself, and on showing how it feeds translation QA. We start by laying out the confusion that surrounds the word revision and the different kinds of revision people perform, sorted by several criteria.

The Concept of Revision Applied to Translation

Many writers have wrestled with how loosely the word revision gets used when people talk about checking translations, in Spanish and well beyond it. English shows the slippage when several words get treated as if they all meant the same thing: bilingual editing, checking, editing, proofreading, revising, revision, review, and self-revision. French does the same with autorévision, correction, relecture, révision, révision bilingue, révision linguistique, révision unilingue, and vérification.

A common tangle in Spanish, for instance, comes from treating revision as a stand-in for correction, naming work meant to polish an original text, or from using the word loosely for both the check a third party (the reviser) performs and the check the translator runs on their own TL (self-revision), rather than reserving it for its widest meaning.

Look at how the standards from this article's introduction define review. ISO 17100:2015 sets out revision in section 2, on concepts tied to translation workflow and technology, as the bilingual examination of target language content against source language content for its suitability for the agreed purpose.

Section 2 of UNE-EN 15038, covering terms and definitions, frames revision this way: an examination of a translation for its fitness for the intended purpose, a comparison of source and target texts, and a recommendation of the corrections that fit.

Here is how the DGT Revision Manual states the same concept and its object:

A comparison of a translation against its original meant to flag or fix possible shortcomings, in both the content and the way it is presented.

Inside the DGT framework, review serves three purposes:

• Raising the quality of the translation.
• Working as a tool for quality control.
• Serving as professional training for the translator and the reviser alike.

Different as they are, those three definitions together capture what proofreading is really about:

• The thing being worked on, which is the TL.
• The requirement to set the source text (original) beside the target text (translation).
• Its core job: spotting errors and shortcomings in the TL against its purpose, so they can be fixed afterward and the quality of the translation holds up.

To round out and sharpen those definitions, here is how we frame proofreading in its broadest sense:

A careful reading of a target text (TL), treated as a semi-finished draft, done either by the person who produced the translation or by a third party, usually set against the source text (TO) and guided by criteria agreed on in advance, so you can confirm that the order's specifications were met and apply the right fixes and improvements to the TL before it reaches the client.

With the various definitions of revision in translation laid out, one more point about terminology is worth raising, because it ties into the criteria we use in the next section to sort the types of revision.

You can split revision into two types, using as your test whether the thing being worked on is a source text (TO) or a translated text (TL).

The French terms for these two activities are révision unilingue and révision bilingue. We do not think that test, the object of the work, suits our classification, since it leans so directly on French terminology. To keep things clear and avoid mix-ups, we favor using correction in English for what might be called révision unilingue (the changes and improvements an author or third party makes to an original text), and reserving revision for the idea of révision bilingue, which means setting the TL against the TO.

Types of Revision: Classification and Criteria

How revision gets done varies a lot, because so many factors shape it: who runs it (the translator or a third party), the setting it happens in (professional or academic), whether it carries an extra aim such as training the translator, how thoroughly it is done, and which parameters apply, among others. So building a classification of proofreading types means first picking the criteria you will sort by. In this section we group the types of revision by two tests: 1) who performs the revision, and 2) whether a secondary purpose exists, depending on the setting where it happens.

According to the Review Agent

Looking at who takes part and how many people get involved in revising a translation, three basic types stand out: self-revision (AR), reciprocal revision (RR) in its two forms, concordance revision (RCC) and cross reading (LC), and collective revision (RCL).

We start with self-revision (SR), since it is baked into the translation process and therefore required of every translator. It matters a great deal, above all for freelancers who cannot always get a third party to review their work before it goes to the client. A translation is not finished until it has at least gone through a self-revision (AR), meaning the same person who produced the TL has gone back over it. The DGT Revision Manual backs this up where it lays out the first step (Preparation and delivery of the text) of an ideal revision: the translator hands over the text they have prepared and delivered to the client.

The translator turns in a finished translation (that is, one already self-revised, spell-checked, and so on), noting any checks, open questions, and solutions, plus the relevant reference documents where they apply.

A professional should grasp how much RA matters, which ISO 17100:2015 reflects when it describes this required step and labels it check: an examination of target language content carried out by the translator. It spells out what that means: the task shall at least include the translator's overall self-revision of the target content for possible semantic, grammatical and spelling issues, and for omissions and other errors, as well as ensuring compliance with any relevant translation project specifications.

On terminology, note that UNE-EN 15038:2006 uses Proofing as another word for self-revision (AR):

After finishing the initial translation, the translator has to go back over their own work. That pass means confirming the meaning carried across correctly, that nothing was dropped and no errors slipped in, and that the agreed service specifications were met. The translator then makes whatever fixes are needed.

Because a third party reviewing the work adds value to the TL, the spread of the Internet among freelancers working without middlemen has helped push peer review (RR) forward. Revision (RR), also called inter-revision and cross-revision, has two translators check each other's work, sometimes by setting the TL against the TO and sometimes by simply reading the whole TL as though it were a TO. Since a third-party review costs both the client and the translator extra, as a complementary service, freelancers can sidestep or trim that added expense by trading the favor with fellow professionals.

Concordance checking (RCC) and cross-checking (LC) are two forms of proofreading. In relecture concordance (RCC), one person reads the translation aloud while a colleague follows along and confirms it lines up with the source text. RCC works between two translators who share the TL's mother tongue, or between two with different mother tongues (the ones in the language pair at hand).

At large companies and institutions, translation quality has slid into a negotiable, even secondary, concern, because productivity is all that gets counted. At the European Commission's Translation Service, the biggest such service anywhere, proofreading looked like a dying breed, since no proofreaders had been hired for a while. That may not have been a misstep, though, once you accept that splitting translators from proofreaders was both unrealistic and unhealthy, given that proofreading reads more as an activity than as a separate job.

As revision in the SoT was cut back steadily and across the board for economic reasons, cross-reading (a form of RR) spread, and the value of self-revision got pushed at the same time. These days, in an institutional setting like the Directorate General of Translation (DGT), cross-reading (LC) happens between two translators (usually the same rank or grade): one reads the full TL and turns to the TO when needed, checking it whenever something catches the reviewer's eye, so errors can be caught.