Localization can be considered a production process and as such is subject to the laws of
the market, its quality standards and philosophy (Total Quality Management). The
same standards can be applied to the processes involved in a localization project, such as
the translation phase which is commonly outsourced to language service providers or
localization companies. The translation phase can be further broken down into a process
component and a product component, each with its own quality standards. However,
quality in translation is amuch debated subject and does not lend itself to a straightforward
application tomarket scenarios, let alone localization. This is why criteria to evaluate
translation within the scope of a localization project need to be clearly established.
Once the appropriate criteria and error categories are selected, a linguistic inspection
should provide an objective and quantifiable evaluation of the quality level of a translation.
A means to measure translation quality is the Translation Quality Index used at
Lionbridge Technologies Inc., a localization company which will be the main source of
examples for this article.
