Translation Quality Measurement

Green Crescent currently employs the ISO 17100:2015 Quality Standards guidelines as our quality goal and the SAE J2450 Translation Quality Metric as the means by which to assess if that goal has been achieved in our organization critical work.

Quality Control Standards

ISO 9001:2015

ISO 9001:2015 is a general series of specifications required in order to ensure a quality management system that seeks to provide products and services that meet applicable statutory and regulatory requirements of both customers and legal authorities. It also seeks to improve overall service through rigorous application of improving quality control systems.

ISO 17100:2015 Quality Standard

ISO 17100:2015 is a specialized series of applicable specifications required in order to ensure a quality translation by mandating and recommending best practices with respect to core processes, resources, and other aspects essential to ensuring a quality output in the translation industry. Such applicable specifications may include legislation, industry codes, best-practice guides, client specifications, and the internal processes of the translation service provider.

Quality Control Metrics

SAE J2450 Translation Quality Metric

Green Crescent employs a version of SAE J2450 Translation Quality Metric (2001). This metric bases its quality scores on seven types of errors and their severity, major or minor:

Types of errors

• Wrong term - terminology is either wrong, misapplied (not from approved glossary), inconsistent or sub-optimal;
• Syntactic error - incorrect part of speech usage, incorrect phrase structure, incorrect word order;
• Omission or addition - failure to include something contained in the source text or including something that isn't in the source or adding superfluous text;
• Word structure or agreement error - word structure error occurs when an otherwise correct target word or term is expressed in an incorrect morphological form (case, gender, number, tense, prefix, suffix, infix, etc.). An agreement error occurs when two or more target words disagree in any form of inflection;
• Misspelling;
• Punctuation error; and
• Miscellaneous errors including typos, pagination, incorrect units, formatting error, text not translated.

Serious vs minor

An error is deemed serious if it meets any of the below criteria:

• If it can cause harm to the user, operator, patient, or consumer;
• damage to the product or to the equipment used in conjunction with the product;
• represents a serious misrepresentation of the author’s intentions or the client’s products or services; or
• can damage the client’s reputation.

If in doubt, an error should be considered categorized as serious.

The quality score is then calculated based on the weighted sum of the errors. The composite score, which decides the translation quality of a text, is the weighted sum of the errors normalized by the number of words in the source text.