Translation companies and quality management systems

On 2002-02-04 18:12, RKKerns wrote:

As Kim has already said, the translator (i.e. we freelancers) should feel that anything less than perfect is not good enough. I personally prefer to work for a customer (be it an agency or end customer) who has some form of quality system. In fact I hate it when I know that my translations are simply passed on to the customer without someone \"in between\" checking them and providing feedback. Questions such as \"why did you translate X as Y?\" or \"what does the abbreviation Z mean?\" are not criticism but an attempt to achieve perfection or at least better-quality translations. Translator satisfaction is therefore in my opinion also an important factor when addressing quality management.







I completely agree. When I am working for an agency, even if the translation I deliver is as perfect as I can get it to be, I like to think the agency offers an additional safety net between me and the client; I don\'t think this is unreasonable, since agencies always add their own charges to what they pay to me, and I like to believe that that added cost for the client is also value that is added to the translation.



Quality control is not only a way to secure customer satisfaction, but also an indispensable defense against bad faith: I don\'t know if this will be helpful to you (and I apologize in advance if you\'ve already heard a story like this before a thousand times), but I can tell you some of my personal experience, about what happens when an agency has no quality control system in place, something that unfortunately seems to be less uncommon than it should be desired. Back when I was young and naive, I once did a translation for an agency, which got back to me claiming that the translation had been rejected by the client because of poor quality. Bewildered (and hurt in my amour-propre, needless to say), I wanted to know exactly what had been the problem, and what did the agency\'s proofreaders say? I found out then that: 1) there were no proofreaders, no quality-control, no double-checking on the part of the agency; 2) the agency had taken the client\'s claims at face value, without even asking what was wrong. What happened after all was that there had been bad faith on the part of the client, who assumed that, if they claimed to be unsatisfied with the translation, they would get it for free, and, as I learned later... they had assumed correctly! In short, the agency had put itself and me in a lose-lose situation, because of no quality control.



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