Jianjun's Blog

According to a poll on a large translation community website, many freelance translators don’t have a QA procedure for their assignments.

Of a total of 650 voters, 34.8% voted they didn’t have such a procedure and wouldn’t consider it; 23.5% voted they didn’t know what it meant; 17.4% voted they didn’t have one but would like to consider in future and only 24.3% voted they had QA in place.

While the poll itself is in no way scientific, it sheds some light on the translators’ attitudes toward Quality Assurance.

A serious and responsible translator should certainly ensure their services to be of top-notch quality. Yeasir Translations recommends translators take the following steps:

• Never accept assignments out of capacity (area of specialty and workload)
• Read and understand thoroughly the original text before starting translation
• Make a standard glossary database for large files to ensure consistency
• Review the whole translation before submitting finished files to clients (paper-based review is preferable)
• Adopt Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools such as TRADOS, WordFast, etc. to ensure consistency (Translation without CAT tools is possible only for small projects.)

To ensure better service experience, translators may also consider:

• A reliable commercial E-mail account and two other backup accounts
• A good backup policy (networked second PC backup, ftp backup, external storage backup – memory stick, harddisk, etc.)
• UPS system and a notebook PC to ensure continuance of work in case of unexpected power failure.

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