What is language quality management about and why it’s not only about the numbers? Sankeshwari Deo from Autodesk will explain it to us.
Andrej Zito
What I what I like what you said is that you know what you want. So what exactly does that mean when it comes to quality management?
Sankeshwari Deo
So for for me, okay, quality management definitely means not just putting what you feel is right, because a lot of times we feel, “Oh, this works best for a certain market or certain language.” But when it comes to, you know, like you said about the end user, it is eventually about the customer experience, whether it is internal or external. And when you’re trying to deliver that you can’t be very rigid about I feel this is, you know, linguistic quality or a certain framework says that I have to have, you know, this quality deliverable or a certain score, and you really have to understand what is your audience? What, where is it going to be used? What is it that they want out of it, and then you try to build or modify, or, you know, just massage a little bit, so it fits for that audience. That, to me is linguistic quality. And I’ve always been an advocate of, you know, saying that don’t just judge everything very rigidly by, “Oh, I think this is like a Fantastic Four, or this is like, this is really a poor quality, one waiting translation.” Because it’s a, it’s a very personal thing, you know, how and we all people, like humans have this tendency, where, if I am a person who was very critical of things, I would say, “Oh, I don’t think this is like the best. But maybe for my audience, that is the best.” It’s, it’s just my personal view there. So yeah, well, I always say that, you know, try to approach something from a more broader audience mindset, rather than just, you know, trying to fit it in the boxes that you have checked for your quality standards.
Andrej Zito
So, from what you’re saying, my understanding is that we should not make quality, subjective to us, to our personality and our views, but rather look at multiple people and how they look at the quality and what the quality means for them. But you still probably need to get some quality evaluation from each of them, evaluate them, or how does it work in practice what you just shared.
Sankeshwari Deo
So, I, you know, and this is more of a recent development over the last year or two of the most. So what what I’m trying to do is right now, and it’s not something that I created, this was like practice at Autodesk. And it’s not something that I’ve seen with other companies that I’ve worked with is where we just don’t work on a numeric score, we also try to attach a value to it, which would give you an overall feel of the translation. So there are attributes that you would rate a quality of translation based on, you know, how is the overall feel of it? And you know, in terms of creativity, in terms of the overall understanding level, you know, what is the fluency, and this is separate from, you know, the basic LQA, or the audit firms that we won. So, keeping that in mind, I think when we go through that, and people rate, probably, let’s say, I would, maybe on a rating of one to five for a quality score, if, you know, my passing is probably a 3.5. And on a very, how would I say, on more concrete scoring basis, I would say that I would give it like a four. But actually, we know when you asked me how you feel about us, “oh, it was great. Like, you know, I probably made some few changes, which is maybe grammar or punctuation or one and two terminology.” I think this was really good, as is my overall feedback, but that doesn’t really translate into how you have rated a translation. So then, you know, trying to understand why did you give that, maybe a 3.5, and you’re saying that it was good, and you could have easily even had like for 4.5. So trying to understand that gap and that is where this part comes in, where you get the overall, you know, feeling or the overall feedback on what a person feels about the translation and then trying to also get some comments and analyze that to see okay, you know, this is what the person feels these are the target areas I need a focus, which I cannot capture on the very concrete basis of 1, 2, 3, 4.
