How To Control The Quality Of Work Of Translators Without Overheading The Project Managers

(MENAFN- Comserve) Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan, Japan, Nov 19, 2021, 10:32 /Comserve / -- The success of any business largely depends on the quality of the goods and services provided. This statement is also true for translation agencies

The success of any business largely depends on the quality of the goods and services provided. This statement is also true for translation agencies. If you establish yourself as a reliable supplier that practically does not create problems for your client, then you will most likely receive a flow of orders for many years and the client will not risk contacting some other translation agency, even if it offers lower prices. ... Conversely, if the quality of your services is low, then you will be content with random one-time orders, and customers will go to competitors.

But if you provide high-quality translation services, then sooner or later the volume of orders will grow so much that you will begin to experience a shortage of qualified translators and will be forced to either refuse clients or jeopardize the quality and give the text for translation to unprepared performers. In other words, you will stop growing. The article will discuss how to avoid this by preparing new personnel in advance for large volumes of orders.

In the bureaus that control the quality of their services, the process is organized as follows.

That is, the text submitted by the translator is first sent to the editor, then (sometimes) to the proofreader, after which additional automatic checks are performed in the most progressive companies with special programs such as Protemos.

Such a process, if properly organized and employing highly qualified translators and editors, provides a high quality translation, which the client is in most cases satisfied with. Therefore, after the completion of the above operations, they forget about the project and move on to a new one. This is where the strategic mistake lies ...

The problem is that the translator performing the very first stage of work does not receive information about what is being done with his file further and what edits the editor makes to its text. Find out more about the translation business management system .

The translator turns into a supplier of raw materials and does not develop professionally. He may not even suspect that the quality of his work is unhappy, and will not know how to improve it.

The editor has been correcting the same mistakes for months or even years. This annoys the editor himself, and he spends too much time editing.

The company is experiencing an acute shortage of qualified personnel: the quality of translators' work is not improving, too much time and money is spent on editing, and attracting newcomers generally seems to be an impermissible risk to reputation. In such a situation, an unexpected large project from a new client causes not joy in managers, but horror …

With this approach, absolutely everything is lost in the long run. How can you avoid this? The answer is obvious: give translators feedback on the quality of their work and educate them on mistakes. And here we cannot limit ourselves to a general comment like“the quality of your translation does not suit us”, since this is most often perceived as a personal grievance. You need to send a complete list of edits, and preferably also a classification of errors with the calculation of the quality factor, so that the translator can see an objective assessment. And the translator should also have the opportunity to challenge edits and classification of errors in a reasoned discussion.

That is, after each work, the editor sends the project manager a list of edits and the calculation of the work quality factor, the manager sends the assessment to the translator, then the translator disputes some edits and sends a file with comments to the editor. Then there can be a discussion in several stages, at the end of which a final grade is given, which the manager enters into the system to take into account the quality of the translator's work.

This process allows you to improve the qualifications of translators and compile statistics on the quality of their work. But why, then, do not the majority of translation bureaus use it?

The most obvious answer to this question is the expression on the manager's face in the picture above. He is already busy with work: he distributes assignments to translators, monitors deadlines, solves a lot of technical problems with projects, communicates with clients. For him, this process is an additional headache, because you need to constantly send letters from the translator to the editor and vice versa, and then document something else. This is an additional waste of time, which already does not exist. An adequate bureau manager understands this and will not require strict adherence to this process for every assignment. As a result, it turns out that most of the translators' work remains unappreciated.

There are two options for relieving project managers of this unnecessary burden:

• Hire a special person who will perform mechanical work;
• Hire no one, but create or implement software that will self-coordinate quality assessment projects.

In the first case, the bureau will receive an additional expense item for a special employee, plus the risk of interruption of the process if he leaves. In addition, the program will cope with this work much more efficiently.

In this case, the manager simply instructs the program to create a project for assessing the quality of work, presses the "Start" button and is removed from the process. The program sends instructions to the editor and translator, coordinates their communication, and after some time sends the manager a ready-made assessment of the quality of the translation work.

The development of such a system is also very costly, but there is a ready-made solution on the market . Below we will look at how it works.

Click Create, and that's it! Further, the participation of the manager is not required. In the meantime, the following happens behind the scenes.

The manager did not participate in the entire process described above, he only created a project, which took no more than a minute, and transferred the boring routine work to the system.

With this approach, one manager will be able to coordinate up to 500 (!) Translation quality assessment projects a day. This time saving allows you to support the process of training translators without significant costs for the company.

In addition, all grades are stored in one system, so you can return to them at any time. And as the data accumulates, you can generate various reports on translators and editors.

You can see how the quality of the translator's work has changed over time.

You can get information about what mistakes the translator makes.

In addition, the system allows you to see the dependence of the translator's assessments on the subject of the translation and on who exactly assessed his translation. Similar reports can be generated for editors: what marks they give on average, what errors they find most often, which translators they give higher marks, etc. Each editor and translator can also view reports on their work.

The reporting function is a powerful tool that allows the bureau chief to understand very clearly what is happening to the quality of work in his company. Everything becomes very transparent, because in a couple of minutes he can find out everything about the quality of a particular translator's work, even without working with him.

The TQAuditor system allows you to automate the process of teaching and assessing the quality of translators' work as much as possible, but its use still entails some additional costs, since you need to pay for the work of editors who classify errors and discuss with translators. Isn't it easier to do everything "the old fashioned way" and save on it?

It all depends on what goals you want to achieve. If you just make more money now, then it is better to skip this process. But if you want to build a strong team of translators and editors who, over time, will be ready to do high-quality work and will allow your company to grow, then you have no other way but to invest in your employees. Otherwise, you will constantly lack qualified translators, and you will reject or lose promising orders. A business does not grow if the people involved do not grow.

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