A new blog post by Common Sense Advisory (CSA Research) reviews new translation quality tools disrupting the localization industry – and lexiQA is one of them. You can read the whole article here.
The second new entrant is lexiQA – from the company of the same name – which first appeared in 2016. COO Vassilis Korkas told us that its unique selling point is that it focuses on locale-specific development and knowledge to facilitate automatic error detection in more than 25 locales. Rather than treating quality assessment as a post-hoc process, lexiQA integrates into the translation process to provide real-time feedback to linguists while they are working. It has a cloud-based interface, but it also has a full API that allows it to integrate into other environments, such as smartCAT, Transifex and Memsource. In addition to its own capabilities, it uses LanguageTool for grammar checks and HunSpell for spelling. Its creators market the tool as an enterprise solution, with volume-based pricing, but several third parties have licensed it in their tools. For example, Translated currently offers lexiQA by default in MateCat’s public instance.
Korkas and the other two co-founders decided to develop lexiQA in part because they found existing solutions lacking: They were either too basic or had high false positive rates that drag down productivity. They therefore aimed to reduce the noise in QA processes with this tool and claim to have reached 5 to 10% false positives for their supported locales, versus a typical industry average of over 50%. Their attention to linguistic knowledge helps here and enables finding issues that general tools miss. For example, the tool understands written-out forms of numbers, so it could know that “Zwölf” in a German text could match “12” – in digits – in English. It also addresses locale-specific date, number, and currency formats.