Translation isn’t straightforward and here’s why:
Some languages read right to left, while others left to right.
There are huge cultural differences between countries – even between those that speak the same language.
Even more consequential, an innocent term in one nation could reap legal repercussions in another.
As the list of language differences goes on, we’re able to recognize one truth.
Translation quality assurance is essential for companies looking to break into new geographical markets.
In this article, we’re going to unpack what translation quality assurance is, its various components, best practices, and implementation tips.
What are the four levels translation quality assurance?
Translation quality assurance, or TQA, refers to the various processes that evaluate and verify the accuracy, consistency, and quality of translations.
Languages differ significantly in structure, idioms, cultural nuances, and contextual meanings.
These discrepancies make translation a complex task that requires careful QA consideration of these variations to ensure the content is both accurate and resonates appropriately with the target audience.
TQA is an encompassing term that accounts for four separate qualities assurance practices: linguistic, visual, functional, and cultural.
1. Linguistic quality assurance
Linguistic Quality Assurance (LQA) focuses on the textual integrity and semantic precision of translations. It involves scrutinizing grammar, spelling, punctuation, and syntax to ensure technical correctness. LQA also assesses the translation’s adherence to the original text’s style, tone, and intended message — generally in accordance with the brand’s glossary or style guide.
Translators and project managers need to ask themselves the following question:
Beyond checking spelling and grammar, does this translation serve the intended purpose of the original word, phrase, or document? For example, the phrase “let the cat out of the bag” is an English reference to revealing a secret. If you translate this phrase word-for-word into any other language, the reader won’t be able to understand the idea being portrayed.
A more practical example of this are the LQA concerns that Marvel experienced in 2014. Guardians of the Galaxy creators decided to translate the film’s title to “星際異攻隊,” which means “Interplanetary Unusual Attacking Team.” Some found the humor in this translation while others called the translation a “disaster.”
Marvel also faced backlash for their inadequate subtitle translations, with local media personnel stating, “Aside from a lot of mistranslations, the subtitles failed to show the original feel of the movie, such as jokes, puns and homophones. We cannot help but doubt the professionalism of the translator.”
That’s to say that while some linguistic translation discrepancies are inconsequential, others — like those of Marvel’s — have financial, reputational, and legal repercussions.
2. Visual quality assurance
Visual quality assurance ensures that all visual elements — such as graphics, layouts, and overall design components — are culturally appropriate and fit well within the translated content. It involves verifying that the translated text fits aesthetically and functionally within the design parameters, maintaining the integrity of the user interface and ensuring that there are no layout issues.
Consider the English phrase “Submit feedback.” In German, a typical translation may be “Feedback einreichen.” Depending on the font, this German translation is approximately 50% longer than the original English phrase. If this phrase were used in a button on a website or an app, the increased length could cause the text to exceed the button’s boundaries or make the layout appear cluttered, unbalanced, and even unusable.
When you consider how this applies to translating extensive amounts of text, the impact on the layout can be substantial and potentially require fundamental adjustments in page structure, menu designs, and overall navigation elements.
3. Functional quality assurance
Functional quality assurance (FQA) ensures that all functional aspects of a product, from its buttons and links to its overall navigational structure, operate correctly in the target language.
In the context of software, apps, or websites, FQA tests the localized version to confirm that it behaves as expected — with no features breaking due to language-related modifications. For instance, when an application is translated into another language, elements such as date and time formats, numerical inputs, and alignment may need to be adapted to suit regional standards.
Here’s a practical example: If the booking system app is designed for a U.S. audience, the date format will be MM/DD/YYYY. However, when localized for a French audience, the date format needs to be changed to DD/MM/YYYY to match local conventions. Without proper functional quality assurance, the app may incorrectly interpret the dates entered by French users, potentially leading to booking errors or even a loss in bookings due to user frustration.
4. Cultural and legal adherence
Cultural translation assurance means ensuring that all translations adhere to local cultural norms. This form of assurance is often tied to the term “internationalization,” or “I18n” for short.
As international business has become increasingly accessible, we have insightful data into how consumers interact — and don’t interact — with localized and non-localized content: Three-quarters of consumers are more inclined to buy products and services when the information is presented in their native language. In that vein, 87% of non-English speaking and reading consumers avoid purchasing from English-only websites. Moreover, over half of the consumers prioritize access to information in their native language over the cost of the products.
Consider how the Turkish language has two distinct versions of the letter “I”: one with a dot (“İ”, lowercase “i”) and one without a dot (“I”, lowercase “ı”). These letters are different and are used in different contexts. If these differences aren’t accounted for when translating content, it can cause various problems: minor miscommunications on the inconsequential end and legal repercussions on the more consequential side.
Also consider the 2012 Shanghai Maritime court case between two corporations: one Chinese and the other British. This case centered around translation errors with significant legal and financial implications, where “drydocking” was mistakenly translated as “tank washing” and “except fuel used for domestic service” was inaccurately rendered as “except fuel used for domestic flights.” These mistranslations led to protracted legal disputes between the involved parties.
The majority of translation errors aren’t of the same consequential magnitude of the Shanghai Maritime court case. Nonetheless, brands that don’t account for cultural differences risk alienating their potential customer base, damaging their brand reputation, and running into financial losses.
When the syntaxial, visual, functional, and cultural combine
It’s when these four factors combine that companies looking to reach into international markets can reap the benefits of localization and TQA more generally.
Take Withings, for example: Withings worked to improve its localization process through the integration of Lokalise with Figma — streamlining the coordination among designers, developers, and translators.
This allowed Withings to roll out features 90% faster by reducing the operational burden of manually handling localization tasks. By embedding translation keys directly into the design phase with Figma, the team ensured that every aspect of the user interface was considered from a linguistic, visual, cultural, and functional standpoint early in the development process.
Here’s the fruit of this work in their own words: “We have improved the quality of the localized UI, ensured higher quality translations, and consistency of the overall product experience.” In turn, Withings experienced a ”big impact on the quality of the user experience.”
Companies around the world share a similar experience: It’s common for companies to improve sales by up to 50% via localization and, by extension, its associated quality assurance best practices, Harvard Business Review mentioned.
Step-by-step: 10 translation quality assurance best practices
The effectiveness of your translation quality assurance measures largely depends on the quality of the systems you adopt. Consider the following 10 step system and adapt it to your own purposes.
1. Prepare and plan
Initiate localization with an exhaustive evaluation of the source content, ensuring it is devoid of inaccuracies, ambiguities, or culturally specific references unsuitable for translation.
Then, define the project’s scope, outlining content complexity, necessary linguistic resources, and stringent timelines. In doing so, develop exhaustive instructions that include comprehensive glossaries, detailed style guides, and term bases that ensure uniformity across translations in various languages. These preparatory materials should clearly specify required terminology, designated voice, and symbols like ™ and ®, while also providing extensive reference materials.
Also incorporate a quality assurance checklist tailored to verify adherence to locale-specific formatting standards (dates, currencies), linguistic precision, and technical compatibility.
2. Set up the right team
Put together an adept translation quality assurance team by selecting professionals proficient in the target language and acquainted with the pertinent subject matter and cultural subtleties.
Note that today, the majority of TQA efforts are placed in the hands of sophisticated software: Translations Management Systems (TMS) and Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) solutions in particular. Nonetheless, you can still lean on hiring native speakers — ideally with qualifications in translation studies — who possess expertise in specific domains such as legal, medical, or technical fields. Additionally, in your team, include native-speaking editors to ensure translations maintain stylistic and grammatical fidelity.
Also consider integrating localization engineers: they will work to embed translated content into final product formats, ensuring seamless functionality within new software environments. Moreover, consider enlisting quality assurance testers, ideally native speakers from the target locale, to authenticate the translation’s accuracy and contextual appropriateness.
3. Utilize technology
TMS and CAT solutions are central to TQA: even 88% of full-time translation professionals use at least one CAT tool, while 78% use two or more. Translation management systems, in particular, function to provide streamlined project management, precise control over linguistic assets, and automated quality checks, among other QA measures.
Consider what tools you’ll need for your translation needs. The TMS quality assurance tools that you may want to rely on include:
- Automated QA checks: This includes the ability to configure and automate checks to minimize errors and inconsistencies, such as spelling, grammar, placeholder mismatches, and HTML inconsistencies.
- Automated translation memory: Translation memory refers to a database that stores previously translated phrases and sentences. This feature aids in maintaining consistency across translations and reduces the time and effort required by automatically suggesting past translations for similar or identical content.
- Automatic translation suggestions: This tool provides real-time translation proposals from leading neural machine translation engines — like those of Google, DeepL, and Microsoft. In turn, you can speed up the translation process while ensuring that the output adheres closely to the source text’s intent and style.
- Built-in spelling and grammar checks: Available across multiple languages, with Lokalise covering 22 languages right out of the box, this feature helps maintain linguistic accuracy by automatically detecting and suggesting corrections for spelling and grammatical errors.
- Eliminated term ambiguity: By defining and describing each term in a multilingual glossary, also known as a term base, this tool ensures that all project translations are consistent and clear, effectively eliminating ambiguity about specific terms used within the text.
4. Ensure linguistic quality assurance
Implement a stringent linguistic QA process that encompasses several review stages to ensure translation accuracy and appropriateness.
Start with automated checks using linguistic software to identify elementary errors in grammar, punctuation, and syntax. This should be followed by detailed reviews from professional linguists who scrutinize the translations for correct use of terminology, technical expressions, and overall textual coherence. Include bilingual reviewers to compare the source and translated texts side by side, ensuring the translation conveys the original message accurately without contextual distortions.
For potentially sensitive or culturally-ambiguous content, employ back-translation techniques where the translated text is re-translated into the original language by another team to identify any misinterpretations or discrepancies.
5. Test the visual components
Visual testing involves the meticulous verification of the layout and graphical interface post-translation to ensure all visual elements are correctly displayed and functional. This process encompasses adjustments for text length variations that affect UI components due to translation, preventing issues such as text overflow or misalignment.
Localization engineers need to test the application on multiple devices to ensure visual consistency and usability are maintained across different screen sizes and resolutions. Special attention should also be given to culturally sensitive elements: icons, colors, and images — ensuring that they are appropriate for each locale. This step generally often involves collaboration with designers to modify UI elements to better fit translated content while maintaining aesthetic and operational integrity.
6. Ensure high functionality
Functional testing in translation quality assurance ensures that all elements of the localized software perform as intended in the target language environment. This step involves systematic testing of interactive components — such as navigation menus, form submissions, and help links — to confirm their operational integrity post-translation.
Challenges like script compatibility, proper functioning of date and currency formats, and right-to-left text alignment for certain languages need to be considered and, if required, addressed. Test each functionality under various user scenarios to identify and rectify any disruptions or anomalies that could impact the user experience, ensuring the software’s reliability and efficiency in real-world applications.
7. Adhere to cultural and legal conventions and regulations
Ensure that all content is compliant with the target locale’s regulatory requirements and cultural expectations.
Legal experts and cultural consultants often collaborate in this phase — particularly in large-scale projects — to scrutinize the localized content for legal accuracy and cultural appropriateness. These stakeholders work to guide necessary adjustments to terminology, visuals, and content structure.
8. Gain feedback
Deploy structured feedback mechanisms to capture detailed user interactions and responses to the localized product. Implement tools that facilitate the collection of both qualitative feedback, through user surveys and forums, and quantitative data, via analytics on user engagement metrics. Analyze this data to identify patterns and specific issues with the localized content.
Then, iteratively refine your translations, adjusting elements based on actual user experiences and specific feedback. Use version control systems to best manage changes — this ensures that each iteration improves upon the last in a trackable manner.
9. Engage in a final quality review
Conduct a rigorous final review using a comprehensive checklist that spans all aspects of the localized project per the defined objectives of stage 1.
This checklist should include checks for:
- Linguistic accuracy.
- Compliance with technical specifications.
- Visual integrity.
- Cultural appropriateness.
- Functional/user interface usability.
- Legal compliance.
- Performance metrics.
Involve multidisciplinary teams in this review to ensure a holistic assessment from linguistic, technical, and design perspectives. Document all findings and ensure that any identified issues are resolved before final deployment. This final audit ensures the localized product is polished and fully prepared for launch, reflecting high standards of quality and precision.
Don’t forget to conduct ongoing monitoring: set up automated systems to track metrics — such as user engagement, error logs, and support queries — which indicate the effectiveness of the localization project. Regularly analyze these metrics to spot trends and areas needing improvement.
Ensure linguistic, visual, functional, and cultural quality assurance with Lokalise
At Lokalise, we’re a leading localization and translation management platform that streamlines the adaptation of web and mobile applications, games, and digital content for international markets.
Our TMS platform automates translation processes, facilitates collaborative project management, and integrates with numerous tools to enhance workflow efficiency, among other key QA benefits.
We make quality assurance easy — providing QA tests in hours, not days.
Our quality assurance checks promptly test spelling and grammatical errors, inconsistencies in placeholders and HTML tags, discrepancies in URLs and email addresses, formatting concerns like whitespace and bracket balance, and much more.
That way, you can translate better, and faster.
See for yourself: Try out all of Lokalise’s features for free for 14 days.
