What is the language services quality?
Let’s start with what is crucial for us…
Our quality is community-driven. We strive to empower our community members to do their best work when volunteering with us. At the same time, we strive to deliver fit-for-purpose content to our Partners.
We are open and clear about the criteria we use for quality assessments. We also aim to offer you necessary tools, information, and training. Rather than just keeping scores, we want to grow and work together to deliver meaningful work.
… and what do we mean by ‘quality’?
Agreeing on a quality definition is not an easy task. The factors we take into consideration and their importance vary greatly. Those include the context, the purpose, the audience, our Partners’ needs, and current industry standards, just to name a few.
We define quality using the following categories:
- free from defects: linguistic errors, wrong meaning, incorrect terminology, or other issues, for example, wrong formatting.
- as expected: as per requirements, needs, and expectations.
- fit for purpose (‘good enough’): with accuracy and fluency required for the audience, content, product type, and intended use.
We engage with our Partners and communities to deliver language services that bring those elements together. We know that getting the quality ‘right’ is a process. We are here to navigate through it together.
When we think about quality, we have in mind:
1. Quality metrics. You can learn about ours in the DQF-MQM error typology section.
We work with harmonized Dynamic Quality Framework - Multidimensional Quality Metrics (DQF-MQM). It outlines the categories you need to consider when working on a project. It also classifies possible issues and organizes them according to their impact.
- If it’s not feasible to apply DQF-MQM to a project, you will be informed by our staff what our alternative approach should be.
2. Quality assurance. We have prepared a separate topic on our forum to talk about what quality assurance means to us. Make sure to familiarize yourself with How to assure quality?
3. Evaluation. You might receive peer evaluation or feedback from our staff. Or you might be the one evaluating your colleagues. While doing this, follow the instructions from the Giving Constructive and Respectful Feedback section.
Remember: There is always room for improvement! It is normal for a translation to go through some changes at the revision stage.
Last but not least, we have a code of conduct. We ask you to deliver work that meets our minimum quality standards as described in TWB’s Code of Conduct.