Quality into Processes

Just a short entry to add to my previous thoughts on translation quality. As national members of the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) are implementing the EN-15038 standard for translation quality, the following two articles provide good background reading:

Juan José Arevalillo Doval describes the history behind the standard in http://www.translationdirectory.com/article472.htm.

In http://www.lisa.org/globalizationinsider/2005/03/quality_from_th.html, Alan Melby describes how quality should be built from the ground up.

As these articles point out, quality should be built into the processes which are used in producing translations. If the translation process has high quality, the end product (the translation) will also have high quality. And with high quality I mean meeting the customer's expectations, not some absolute high quality.

Customers do have very different assumptions about the quality they expect to receive. Finding out what those assumptions are, and creating a solution to meet them in a way that allows also the translation vendor to stay in business is essential both for customers and for vendors.