Wednesday, December 26, 2018

How to lose a customer in 3 steps


Every day, our industry is becoming more and more competitive.Whether it is linguists who compete for smaller projects, or agencies with large teams competing for larger equipment, customers tend to look for the result cheaper, faster, more reliable and of the highest possible quality for your projects. But, as we know, that is not always the case.
In order to keep a customer satisfied, language services providers have to provide a job with the best possible quality for your needs. Translation agencies and companies often rely on three and sometimes four steps to achieve this. Today, may not be sufficient to provide only a three-step translation service (we are talking about the flow standard work of translation + editing + correction or Proofreading). It is likely that you need a fourth step (depending on the type of project), and that is a step of evaluation of quality, or QA. For us, a QA exceeds the capacity of a Project Manager under certain conditions, as when the word count exceeds 10,000 words, when the PM is not competent in the target language, when we handle many repetitions or when our source file is a file converted (from documents to editable Word files scanned), just to name a few.\
When it comes to big projects, there are often more than one linguist involved, at least in the early stages of the project. The spell must be aware of this situation so that you can focus on the repetitions and segments that may have only a couple of words changed. If the involved editors cannot work together, or if there are no guidelines on specific terminology, then the spell will have a job a little more difficult. I can say that we find sometimes that there are some things even after a 3-step workflow. We are human, we tired after working for hours in the same project. Our eyes may be tired, and some things can skip our approach. It is here where this last step in QA becomes essential. We can rely on a specific software to help us with this stage. One of the best programs is Bench, but not the only one, since you can always count on tools built to each programmer or other similar applications as Verifiable.
But as I said, software is not everything, and is not always easy to carry out a quality control in certain projects. Two examples of factors that might hamper it are: a) projects that are utilize post-editing or machine translation (MT) Edition, and b) projects that our source is a converted file. In the case of the MT, you need a good eye to make sure there are no inconsistencies in our language of destination (this in terms of specific terminology), since the machine tends to provide different translations for the same word of segment to segment. This is particularly true for the MT based on neural networks.
For example, take the word "lacuna". In a project where the context/subject is the natural water tank, a machine would translate this word as "lagoon" in a segment, and would then change drastically that translation to "gap" (this time with the meaning of lapses).Therefore, we cannot blame to machine translation for not being consistent, since up to now there has been no way to determine if the context requires the use of a synonym or a change in words or not. That's where I still have space to claim the "added value" caused by humans!
Our other example is a converted source file. If we do not do a good job of per-Edition, at the beginning we would be condemned to find several inconsistencies in our project.From numbers converted in letters and vice versa, until "illegible" or misspelled words that would cause us to lose the context.
Provide a 4-step translation service can make a difference. Only transfigure that every step is done well from the outset, to make your concealer only to do as little as possible. It is simply to do everything possible to keep your customer satisfied.