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Linguistic Quality Management (LQM)

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Linguistic Quality Manager? What do we need them for? Find out all about this role and how it works in the localization industry.


What’s up everyone? This is unreasonable because they shouldn’t get me welcome to the new localization basics. In this one, we are going to tackle the mysterious LQM, what the fuck is LQM? So according to the poll that I made on LinkedIn, LQM stands for Linguistic Quality Management.

Now, what does that mean? In simple terms? Well, our clients come to us with something they want to vocalize or translate. Let’s illustrate that it’s done in the English. And what we do is we send this source files to translation. But what we don’t want to do after that is just send the translation right back to the client, because the client doesn’t understand all the different languages. So they will just trust us, because that’s what all the partnerships is based on trust, right?

So let’s imagine that the translation from the very first person who did the translation actually just goes into the world. Okay, this is the world and people look at it. And it’s just this only one person who did the translation. And, you know, people make mistakes here and there. So the result of that, that the translation actually sucks, and the customers for the client are very disappointed. So you want to prevent this because we cannot just put all our eggs into one basket, which is this basket of one translator per language.

So what we want to actually do is we want to ensure that there is some quality process and language linguistic quality process in place. And that is done by adding more steps into the workflow that will ensure that the translation is actually of the desired quality and that the client wants from us. So maybe you have someone do the review someone do the proofreading someone do the editing or something like that. So what we want to do is basically have more eyes look at the linguistic quality, to ensure that the quality is there, and the client can trust that process. And once the product goes into the world, that people will not be disappointed.

So the person who actually puts together this, let’s say the workflow, the optimal work for for the client for each different situation is linguistic quality manager or language quality manager or however you want to call it. And they basically suggest the optimal process, like who should be reviewing what, how much, and so on.

And then we’ll the LQM person also puts together is some sort of system for quality management, where you can report the different issues that you encountered. And maybe you also want to categorize them, like is this important? Is this a minor thing is this critical, and is this personal preferential and so on, and based on that maybe at the end, you get some score, which is kind of like your KPI, which is basically one number representing the linguistic quality. And then you can monitor the quality over time to see whether the quality is improving or it’s getting worse, or it’s at least hopefully, constant. That should be and then of course, if you have some issues, the LQM person can work with the linguist on resolving this maybe putting together some better process in the place, or somehow trying to figure out a way how to move the KPI up.

That’s my explanation for LQM!

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