Pointing the way to quality!
We are very happy to host today an interview with one of lexiQA’s earliest advocates. Born as a freelance translator, today Christian is the owner and general manager of FaustTranslations. For over 25 years now, the company has been successfully combining customer requirements with linguistic expertise. In both his professional and personal lives, honesty and responsibility are qualities Christian values above all else.
Tell us a bit about you and your company, the languages you mainly work with and the technology you use.
FaustTranslations.com is a family-owned company that specialises in translation management. That means for our clients we choose the right professionals for their translation requests and until a project’s timely completion we manage the entire workflow including: translation, copywriting or transcreation if needed, editing, proofreading, quality assurance, ICR, layout control and DTP, terminology and translation memory management. Currently our team consists of nine in-house managers and a pool of approx. 800 external specialised freelance translators.
We have resources for all language combinations that are required in global business, but of course the biggest volumes are for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Chinese. We also provide services for other European languages, including the Eastern European ones, such as Russian and Polish where we see a steadily growing demand, and then of course other important languages like Japanese, Korean and Arabic.
Technology is very important for us and our entire industry. We have to handle more and more clients every day with ever increasing volumes of content to be translated as quickly as possible at competitive prices. In 2016 we restructured our business from scratch and we now use exclusively cloud-based applications which guarantee collaborative workflows, are extremely efficient and allow the integration of the exact tools we want to have on board. The times when you had to rely on a single software vendor are certainly gone.
What are the main challenges you deal with on a day-to-day basis, particularly with issues of quality?
As I said, growing volumes with tight deadlines and without any compromise for the quality is our main challenge. Fortunately, we have at hand the most efficient tools which are available today. You mentioned quality. Let’s take QA as an example: we have a manual with 100 pages to check. Since we have highly professional translators and editors, we always have good quality after translation and editing are done. But perfect? Not always.
It’s recommended to do an additional QA check for inconsistencies, brand names, blacklisted terms that must not be used in the translation, special requirements by the client or the target market. Of course, we don’t want to read again 40,000 words looking for a handful or errors (if there are any errors at all). So we use a QA tool like lexiQA that is highly adaptive to our and our clients’ needs to find and show only these errors for correcting. Of course, we have a special policy with a pre-set team of translators and a project manager attached to the account of any single client. Human professionalism together with the right tools is the most productive and efficient combination in order to achieve high quality.
How do you deal with these challenges? Human resources, new workflows, new technologies?
New technologies that offer a collaborative workflow and connectivity via APIs are crucial. We reorganised our workflows, that worked well for over 20 years, from scratch. Smartcat is now the ecosystem we rely on, connected with additional tools like lexiQA and Protemos that we use in conjunction with others, for example Pipedrive and Slack.
Eventually, we came up with a highly flexible solution that offers huge advantages for all people involved – translators, project managers and clients. The increase in efficiency is astonishing. Any doubts? Based on our new organisation, we implemented a 5-hour workday last January and it works without any shortcomings.
In your experience, what is the best way to approach the issue of translation quality? Any new approach you can recommend?
The best way to approach the issue of translation quality is without any doubt an experienced project manager in combination with the right tools. I am a big proponent of “garbage in, garbage out”! In other words, you have to prepare your translation projects as well as you can – then you can almost be sure that you’ll have no issues during the process.
The first step is to check and fix the terminology, the blacklisted terms, brand names and so on. The second step is to establish the QA process you want to have for an individual project. You define the spots in the process that might be critical. Here, the experience of the project manager who knows the client very well is important. The third step is, of course, to choose the right specialists, i.e. translators, editors, proofreaders, for the defined workflow.
Interestingly, with our new collaborative workflow, all these people work together at the same time on all the files and translation memories and glossaries, they communicate in real time. As a result we get higher quality, shorter delivery times and less work for everybody involved.
What do you see for the future? Will the industry be able to cope with the growing demands for better quality and bigger volumes of content?
Oh yes! We are witnesses to astonishing developments which are coming very, very fast. For example, machine translation will play a big role in the next years. The results are already stunning, and in the future we will see more and more MT with post-editing and automated or computer-assisted QA.
As I already said, when we do our homework first, preparing reliable glossaries and translation memories, and use these in combination with machine translation and automated QA, we can manage bigger volumes and deliver high quality within a shorter timeframe.
But, as I also claimed earlier, that’s not possible when you don’t use the most modern and efficient tools and technologies. That’s why we decided to go for Smartcat and lexiQA as the most promising solutions today!