When it comes to translations, bend ‘m like Beckham

With the 2010 World Cup kicking off in just four months in South Africa, soccer fever is starting to rise. Soccer aficionados will be glued to screens in every corner of the world to watch the high-quality drama unfold. In millions of houses spirited debates will ensue about what makes a team, a player or a coach good or bad. In other words: discussions about quality.

Translations and soccer do not seem to have a lot in common at first. But when viewed through the perspective of quality management system ISO 9001, they may have some surprising common ground.

ISO 9001 is a system that describes elements of a process that, when followed, increases a company’s chances to deliver a high quality product. Or a service, like translations or soccer.

Just like a translation provider, the World Cup is a business. It delivers a service (soccer) to a client (TV and stadium audience). And just like translations, the quality of its service is the result of a process that results in a certain outcome. An excellent translation of say, an IFU for a home glucose measuring device, will make the user understand the purpose and function of the device.  An excellent soccer game may advance a team to the finals.

Let’s take a look at the five main pillars of ISO 9001 and how these elements could be applied to translations and soccer. …. More...

The fifth element

In the vast localization sea, we are all enrolled in a tireless quest, trying to find the right definition of quality and to identify substantial boundaries that will finally allow us to grasp it. However, despite its heavy presence in blogs, tweets and forums, it constantly manages to leak away from our objective variables and measuring efforts. That elusive notion called quality evaporates like thin air, and leaves us wondering and discussing its real nature. Our four pillars for this brief discussion about quality are linguistic performance, CAT and QA tools, certified processes and client needs. Will these four forces help us find our way to our long pursued fifth element*?

1. Language
Many localization experts would agree that linguistic quality is the key foundation of translation excellence. Each linguistic milestone fulfills a different endeavour with the final aim of achieving top linguistic quality. Translation, editing and proofreading assure that source contents are efficiently transferred to the target language. We all know that there are different requirements depending on the component, file format, subject matter or document type, and they all go beyond linguistic correctness. So, are there valid global and universal variables that can measure accuracy, consistency, readability, adequacy,…? Do we really explore and develop the significance of the different linguistic aspects? …. More...