Translation review best practices: How to build a quality process

What is translation review?

Translation review is the process of examining a translation to ensure that it accurately conveys the intended meaning of the original text. Translation review consists of:

• Proofreading: Making sure there are no spelling or grammatical issues (you can automate this almost entirely)
• Linguistic review: Making sure quality, consistency, tone, and style are there (this part of the translation review process requires input from a human reviewer)

This process is typically performed by a skilled language professional. They should have the necessary expertise in both the source and target languages, and know the subject matter in question.

When to use translation review and why

The entire customer experience hinges on translations.  

For content to resonate, translators are continuously making considerations regarding word choice, sentence structure, and overall flow of the content. 

In some cases, it will be necessary to ensure the translations are 100% accurate. Other times, you’ll have room to creatively translate a message. The level of translation review that you’ll need will depend on the content and its purpose. 

Here are the three main case scenarios that will give you a general sense of the review process required.

1. Low visibility + low importance →  Automated translation review

Not all content is created equal. You might not always need the highest quality. 

Content like internal documentation, customer support articles, and FAQs don’t have to be perfect. They need to be effective, meaning your customer can access the necessary information to solve their problem. The emphasis is on accuracy, not style or tone of voice. 

For most content of low visibility and importance, automated QA will likely be sufficient to get the job done. We’ll cover how you can incorporate automated QA into your workflow below.  

2. High visibility + high importance →  Human translation review

For high visibility/high priority content like website copy, marketing or advertising copy, and sales collateral, you’ll want to be sure that your company’s distinct style and voice comes across just right. That’s why you need human expertise.  

Marketing localization is an exercise in technique and creativity for translators. Writers have to cram the intended message (the essence of the text) into a few words, and those have to be just as impactful for the target audience as they are in the source text. 

Most people wrongly assume that short texts need less time to be translated – it’s “only a couple of words.” But that couple of words can be very tricky to translate, and they can make or break your campaign.

3. All other content  →  Automated QA + partial human translation review

For most of your content, the goal is to find the right balance between your budget, tech capabilities, and the translation quality you need.

If your company has a lower language quality threshold, automated QA tools can handle a lot of the heavy lifting. Pair them with feedback from internal stakeholders, and you’re set. 

Translating simpler elements like buttons or product UI? Automated QA is a smart, cost-effective solution—especially when you add a partial human translation review to catch anything the machine might miss. 

To make the most of your time and resources, focus on areas that lay a strong foundation, like optimizing your tools, and evaluating the results by gathering feedback from those who use the translations daily. This way, you keep quality high without overspending.

How do I build a workflow around translation review? 

Your translation review workflow can be organized in three key steps: define the quality bar, review translations, and consolidate the feedback. Let’s take a closer look.

Step 1: Define the quality bar

In this phase, the key is to make sure everyone is aligned on style, glossaries, and the team responsible for the review. Without defining these, quality remains subjective, and it will be difficult for your language partner to meet your expectations. 

1. Define the style guide

Mature companies will have a language lead for each language they operate in. They are responsible for defining style guides, glossaries, and translation memories. 

Companies that aren’t as mature usually work with an LSP to adapt their general guidelines for each country. According to Rachel Ferris, Chief of Customer Success at Acclaro, LSP needs to be directly involved:

“The LSP should collaborate with you to create detailed glossaries and style guides to ensure consistency of niche terminology, style, voice, and incorporate target audience information.” 

The bottom line is–if you have high visibility/important content, you need to translate meaning rather than just words. A detailed guide is vital to respecting nuance, subtlety, and the distinct style of your brand voice. This is where Google Translate and most of the machine translation tools fall short.

2. Define glossaries + translation memory

A glossary is another core component of the language assets that you will need to keep terminology consistent and lower the risk of inaccuracies. This will make the translation review much easier. 

You’re likely familiar with the term glossary—it’s a list of words, and their meanings, relating to a specific subject. 

With Lokalise, you can set up a glossary for your projects to define and describe each word. You can also set whether a term is translatable or case-sensitive. Here’s an example showing a non-translatable, case-sensitive term:

So, where does translation memory fit into the translation review workflow? 

Translation memory (TM) is a database of sentences, or text segments, and their translations that can be reused automatically when translating similar or identical content in your translation projects.  

By reusing content, you can accelerate translations while ensuring accuracy and keeping translation rates under control

3. Establish a team of translation reviewers 

How you set up your review team will depend on your resources. Generally, the options you have available fall into two buckets: 

• In-house: Internal company resources like native speakers on your team or in-country resources.
• Outsourced: Freelance reviewers, local subject-matter and language experts, or your language partner

If you’re working with a language partner, the ideal scenario is to have them take care of the translation review. However, if you aren’t satisfied with the quality of translations, you should look into working with a different vendor to set up a system of checks and balances, especially as you consider what are translation services and what level of quality and oversight they should provide.

Step 2: Translation review

Once you’ve defined what quality means for your organization, you can use the resources established in the previous step to perform translation review. We’ll discuss what tools you can use in the next section.  

The crucial step here is toset feedback expectations. Every time you suggest a change, there needs to be a reason for it. It’s obvious why—vague feedback will likely result in repeated mistakes.

How to measure quality of translation review

Language quality is subjective. A good translation for one person may sound “weird” to another.  

To remove subjectivity from the equation, you need clearly defined guidelines–which we mentioned in step one.  

Here’s one example. At Slack, the “quality pillar” is in charge of maintaining quality standards at scale. Their pass score for language quality is 97%, meaning all content quality evaluations must score 97% or higher for them to consider that this translated content meets Slack’s standards for quality. 

Step 3: Consolidate the feedback

In this phase, the key is to consolidate the review made in the previous step. All the errors and changes should be taken into account so that you can:

• Update glossaries and translation memories to ensure that you avoid mistakes in the future, move faster, and achieve the desired consistency
• Give feedback to the translators about quality

Share the scoreboard with the translators/vendors. Find a consensus to agree/disagree on the bugs reported. This will help to improve collaboration overtime. 

Translation review tools

Cloud-based translation management systems have made it easier than ever to ensure quality translations. Lokalise is one of them. 

Lokalise makes it much simpler to manage translation reviews. It provides the necessary functionality to automate a chunk of your review workflow. Automated QA checks will catch any:

• Spelling errors
• Grammatical issues
• Terminology inconsistencies using the glossary (before your content moves through to review)
• Inconsistent placeholders
• Inconsistent HTML (source vs. target)
• Different numbers (source vs. target)
• Special placeholders (target)

By integrating these automated checks into your workflow, tools like Lokalise free up your team to focus on higher-level quality concerns.

Faster translation review = faster launches 

Translation quality doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does need to be consistent. By setting up a translation review workflow that works for your team, you’ll make sure your message hits the mark in every language. 

As the last takeaway, we’d like to state something that might seem obvious, but it’s very important nonetheless. Faster translation reviews lead to faster launches in new markets. This gives you an incredible competitive advantage and makes the entire localization process much smoother. 

But don’t take our word for it.  

ActiveCampaign managed to streamline its localization efforts using Lokalise. This enabled the company to launch localized campaigns in just two days.

Example of a well optimized translation review workflow

ActiveCampaign improved their translation review process with features like automated QA checks, translation memory, and glossaries. Internal reviewers, vendors, and engineers reduced manual processes and saved time, which brought quantifiable business benefits. 

All team members worked within a single platform. Because of this, and the way they optimized the translation review process, Active Campaign saw a 16% reduction in translation costs and a 73% increase in traffic to localized content. 

Here’s what Marina Casaril, Senior Content Marketing Specialist, had to share: “The translation history feature is super helpful, enabling me to review, perform quality assurance, and compare versions with ease. Additionally, I find the Lokalise AI feature quite useful for accelerating the workflow, especially when we face tight deadlines.”   

We invite you to sign up for Lokalise and give it a try. The platform can help you optimize translation reviews, decrease costs, and improve the quality of your localized content. It’s free to try for 14 days, no strings attached: sign up here.