Tracking Language Quality Trends: What Localization Leaders Need to Know
If you’re looking to boost translation quality, ongoing reviews and expert feedback can reduce errors day to day. But that’s only one benefit of a well-structured language quality management program.
As a localization program leader, you need more than a snapshot of what’s happening at a given time. You also need to see how your decisions and actions—or even your lack of actions—are affecting language quality over time.
For this reason, tracking quality trends is vital if you plan to improve localization in the long run. Let’s explore the essentials you need to know, whether you work with a third-party provider or an in-house team.
Why Is Tracking Quality Trends So Important?
By understanding quality trends, you remove guesswork from your decisions about multiple aspects of localization. Insight into trends is extremely valuable if you want to:
- Track progress toward your quality goals and assess whether your translation program is on the right path.
- Identify trouble spots by comparing performance across different languages, regions, content types, or translation providers.
- Evaluate how changes—like new tools, guidelines, or team members—are affecting translation outcomes.
- Make well-informed decisions about future hiring, training, vendors, timelines, and resources.
If you conduct quality reviews without tracking trends, your program is flying blind into the future. You miss out on one of the top advantages of language quality management: the opportunity to learn from past results, make course corrections, and keep improving your process.
How the Process Works
Quality trend analysis allows you to see the big picture, spot issues that require attention, and prioritize what’s most urgent. So how does this process work?
- Decide how and what to track. Your provider will work with you to choose a quality framework (such as DQF-MQM), determine what dimensions of linguistic quality to track, and decide how to weigh different criteria in quality scoring. You’ll need to clarify which aspects of quality matter most to you, how heavily to weigh errors, what your top priorities are, and what goals you plan to achieve with the content.
- Establish pass/fail criteria: Different regions, languages, and content types may have different thresholds for what counts as success or failure. By working with consistent criteria, you gain a clear view of how success rates are improving, declining, or staying flat over time. Make sure to use the same criteria for all languages if you want to compare performance across linguistic divisions.
- Evaluate and analyze trends: During the review and assessment process, your quality management team compiles data to track trends in translation quality. A professional provider will use specialized software tools to make this process easier, more efficient, and more accurate.
- Review the results: Your quality assessment team should provide you with regular reports about trends. This analysis may include a detailed look at different components of your localization program, along with recommended steps to address trending issues. Reporting can be every week, month, or quarter—whatever makes sense for your needs.
Once you have this information, it’s time to interpret the metrics, validate your assumptions, and plan what to do next. If you see signs of trouble, you can act before problems escalate. Are the trends heading in the right direction? Enjoy peace of mind, knowing that your program is on the right track.
How to Make the Most of Language Quality Trends
A capable third-party provider can offer guidance and handle routine monitoring, analysis, and reporting. Nonetheless, you play a key role in shaping the outcomes—so keep these guidelines in mind to get the most out of tracking quality trends.
- Keep the data coming.
If you only perform sporadic reviews, you’re unlikely to gain insight into how quality is trending. To get a useful supply of data, your programs need a consistent, continuous process to review, assess, and analyze translation quality.
- Maintain consistent criteria.
Once you establish your metrics, do your best to stick to them. If you change your scoring methods or pass/fail thresholds midway, you risk skewing your data and distorting your view of quality trends.
- Get the sample size right.
You don’t need to review everything, especially if your team is handling large volumes of material. Work with your team or provider to decide how much to sample—usually 20 percent or less. You can broaden the review scope later if your analysis reveals significant issues, or reduce it if the trends look positive and stable.
- Pick a tempo that fits your needs.
More frequent reporting—for example, every week—might be useful if you’re setting up a new program or dealing with highly sensitive content. Or start with a slower pace, then increase if you notice trends that call for more intensive monitoring.
- Look for detailed insights.
A broad overview of quality trends only goes so far. To gain more meaningful insights, ask your team or provider for a detailed breakdown by region, language, or content type. This higher level of detail gives you a stronger foundation for resource allocation and decision-making.
- Embrace automation.
With today’s quality review tools, there’s less and less reason to rely on inefficient, error-prone manual processes. If you work with a third-party provider, ask what technology it uses to automate basic monitoring and analysis so its team members can focus on higher-value tasks—such as making sense of quality data, taking action to mitigate errors, and fine-tuning automated quality and terminology checks.
- Don’t just analyze. Act!
As a localization program leader, you’re in charge of translating insights into action. That means evaluating the data properly, developing an action plan, and executing it promptly. The greatest challenge, in many cases, is interpreting what trends in quality mean and pinpointing their root causes. Even if you think you know the answer, look to investigate further and test your assumptions with your translators and quality reviewers—so you can find the right solution.
One More Reason to Build Your Language Quality Management Program
By tracking trends in language quality, you take your efforts beyond routine QA. With a clear picture of how quality is evolving, you can address issues earlier and make strategic decisions for your localization program.
Sounds good, right? It’s just one more advantage of establishing a consistent, professional process for assessing translation quality—and partnering with an unbiased third-party provider that understands the nuances of language quality management.