La qualita' nella localizzazione: l’esempio di Lionbridge Technologies Inc.

Localization can be considered a production process and as such is subject to the laws of the market, its quality standards and philosophy (Total Quality Management). The same standards can be applied to the processes involved in a localization project, such as the translation phase which is commonly outsourced to language service providers or localization companies. The translation phase can be further broken down into a process component and a product component, each with its own quality standards. However, quality in translation is a much debated subject and does not lend itself to a straightforward application to market scenarios, let alone localization. This is why criteria to evaluate translation within the scope of a localization project need to be clearly established. Once the appropriate criteria and error categories are selected, a linguistic inspection should provide an objective and quantifiable evaluation of the quality level of a translation. A means to measure translation quality is the Translation Quality Index used at Lionbridge Technologies Inc., a localization company which will be the main source of examples for this article.