When a business expands its market to a global scale, it usually innovates products fit for the local target market. While this can be very ideal for the company, other aspects of the business also need updating. One of which is translating content so other international markets can understand them.
The translation process involves different parts, including managing translators, tracking the progress of each project, automating workflows, and responding to inquiries and questions from translators. Overseeing the process and monitoring the elements can be a handful to manage. Hence one needs to have specific sets of linguistic quality KPIs to measure the outcome of the translations accurately.
Linguistic quality defined
Linguistic quality is how the language and translations meet specific requirements or standards. They can be identified based on established standards in the industry or concerning particular context-related qualities. Evaluating the quality of any translation project involves a set of metrics. Every metric varies depending on the provider. Ensure you get to check the sets of metrics first before committing to a translation company.
What is a KPI
KPI refers to a critical performance indicator, a quantifiable performance metric for a specific objective. Additionally, KPIs offer targets for teams and organizations, milestones that gauge progress, and insights that will help people in the organization create better decisions.
As for linguistic quality KPIs, they will help you get insights into the timeline of the translation process. Also, the KPIs will reveal the resources consumed by particular translation activities, team members, and project types. Consequently, you can make the necessary adjustments to workflows, activities, and teams to improve translation efficiency.
The benefits of linguistic quality KPIs
KPIs, whether in translation, localization, linguistics, and marketing, allow teams and organizations to ensure every project meets the quality metrics and more.
- A KPI allows predictability. Additionally, teams can use that predictability in working on future budgets. More importantly, linguistic quality KPIs will enable you to close the possible gaps between results and goals.
- As you sturdy the KPIs for specific projects, you can determine the weak points in your strategy.
- Besides the weak points, KPIs also help teams uncover fresh opportunities. In context, suppose you are tracking language revenue in different countries; along the process, you can see untapped markets and markets where you wish to cease localization support.
The different linguistic quality KPIs used in translation and location projects
Every organization, translation provider, and the team has respective KPIs they utilize in their translation processes. The following are some common ones that you might encounter while searching for providers.
Post-editing time average.
This is one of the most essential linguistic quality KPIs. It involves the duration of human translators in editing machine-translated words to enhance quality. Translation providers and localization managers know that tracking this process is necessary as it can affect turnaround time and possibly create bottlenecks. Additionally, post-editing also includes checking the style and tone, punctuations, typos, layout, and grammar. All these elements can affect the overall result of the project.
The number of segments and words translated.
If the first KPI allows you to improve the efficiency of translations, the second KPI helps you understand and estimate project costs. In most cases, translation costs are based on the number of segments or words translated. The numbers will then be multiplied by the translator’s rate. The KPI measurement per project type helps you identify the average cost of translating a text.
The number of words in glossaries and translation memories.
The larger the glossaries and translation memories, the less time allotted to translations. They serve as a database that stores segments, paragraphs, and sentences that have been previously translated. Additionally, it ensures consistency among similar topics and texts and develops high-quality translations. Also, teams can identify which among the memories need more improvements and which of those are generating better results.
Translation actions.
This basically involves all the activities happening within the translation process. Moreover, they allow you to understand the workflow of translators, determine bottlenecks, make more precise guidelines, and determine and track the possible concerns that might frequently come up. It is generally an activity log within the TMS (translation management system), which shows the tools used in translation projects and the frequency of translators visiting the project before it’s finished, among others.
Translation outcomes.
In most cases, translation does not stop with checking the linguistic quality; they provide metrics to help you measure the results of the translation projects. From here on, you can track various data points related to translation goals, including the site traffic on pages and languages, keyword rankings, and revenue and click-through rates from multiple regions.
Manage your content with the right translator services provider
More than the linguistic quality, companies planning to expand their business internationally must consider the various KPIs every translation provider has. More importantly, it is vital to boost website traffic and engagements by partnering with reliable providers that can translate website content for you. Circle Translations offers translations on a vast array of content, including product descriptions and user feedback, and localizes the speech interface for chatbots. As diverse as your target could be, we ensure to also guide you in diversifying your target audience across various markets seamlessly. Our project managers and pool of professional translators are more than capable of realizing your international expansion goals.
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