So you jumped on the automatization bandwagon and now want to run automatic Quality Assurance (QA) on translations.
How do you do that?
The general approach to run automatic QA is to use:
- QA options built into CAT tools.
- Internal QA tools developed in-house (a popular scenario among LSPs that deal with highly inflected languages with complex morphology).
- 3rd party tools: In the 2019 Nimdzi Technology Atlas, we list 10 systems of this kind.
QA tools normally work with bilingual (source and target) files. They help you to find:
- Spelling issues
- Terminology deviations from the glossary
- Inconsistency in the translation of identical text segments, as well as identical translations for different source segments
- Errors in numbers and their format, links, units, punctuation marks, extra/incorrect spaces
- Issues with camel words
- Issues with tags
To avoid false positives that these QA tools may generate, it’s highly recommended to create special configurations that would be used to automatically reduce the noise. For example, for Verifika it would be a quality profile per project/language.
Though some tools still provide QA reports in Excel sheets, the better way is to utilize the solutions which offer automatic updates of the segments being QAed – right from the report. Otherwise, it takes a lot of time to switch between working environments and implement all the needed changes into the working files.
