Linguistic Quality Assurance (LQA) is a critical phase in each successful translation project, whether it is a document translation or website translation. For their projects, clients expect and deserve the best quality language translation. Any mistakes or errors in the final translation will adversely affect the client’s faith in the professionalism shown by the service vendor and the integrity of the project overall. As a result, service providers need to ensure there are no Linguistic mistakes in any of the projects they manage.

LQA Teams
Any localization or translation service provider you select will have a linguistic quality assurance team among their ranks. It is vital to ensure that the proofreader and the linguistic editor that conducted editing during the project are not the same ones that conducted the original translation. Some linguistics might offer to conduct self copy editing and proofreading as well but this does not guarantee a high-quality product for the client.

Translation and editing are two processes handled by two different linguists. During this stage, an editor is given the task of checking and proofreading the original content received from the translator for completeness and accuracy. The next step involves the linguistic quality assurance process, which is also the final quality check. Service providers must approach this process correctly as it reviews the translated content for linguistic, industry and technical accuracy. This ensures that the client receives successful and accurate translations delivered to them throughout all multimedia, software localization, website and document projects.

During the linguistic quality assurance process, a language expert ensures that the final transcript is technically accurate, meaning, it has the proper tense, collocations/word use, no errors in spelling, accurate grammatical structure and style including grammar consistency.

Purpose of Linguistic Quality Assurance
Linguistic quality assurance also helps to review the translation for accurate use of linguistic phrasings like terminology, cultural accuracy, idiomatic expressions and local/ regional terms. This guarantees that the final product is perfectly suited for target markets and can be naturally understood by the target audience in a similar way as the source content did for the original audience. Linguistic quality assurance also ensures that the final product doesn’t come across as awkward or has a stilted literal translation.

Finally, the linguistic quality assurance process involves rechecking the translated content for industrial accuracy, ensuring that the content contains corresponding industrial vernacular or terminology about any specific subject. For example, various industries like hospitality, technology, food etc., have terminologies specific to their industry that should be included in the final content to make it more compatible with the target audience.

Skills Desired in LQA Professionals
A linguistic quality assurance expert is expected to be proficient in the skills mentioned below:

English Proficiency:
Testing localized products requires a strong understanding of the original language, which is usually English.

Target Language Proficiency:
A linguistic quality assurance tester must have a strong connection to the target language. The testers should be experts in the target language as well as remain up-to-date about new terminologies, slang and any other changes in the language.

Computer Knowledge:
Testers usually have to report defects, test product functionality or simply take screenshots of the final product. Being proficient in operating computers is crucial to ensure that the tester can manage simple troubleshooting tasks.

Internet Skills:
Verifying texts and specific terminologies, and searching for common expressions and terms needs expert skills in research as well as a good amount of common sense. An expert tester possesses the ability to pay attention to detail and locate exactly what they are searching for.

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