What makes a professional translator? Is it a high level of fluency in both languages? Is that the perfect management of time? Or maybe exceptional research skills? Indeed, but not enough. Machine translation and artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT may one day replace many human translators in this age of Industry 4.0. That’s why you should acquire additional talents these robots can’t perform.

Scripted by
Tue Nguyen

Then, what steps can we take to ensure our success as translators in this competitive market? With CAT Tool and QA Tool expertise, the tables have been turned in your favor. Previously in our Blog section, we showed you the basic steps of using Trados for translation. The time for progress has come!

Preparation

Quality Assurance (QA) process begins with reviewing the QA Settings for your Target language.

While Trados has enabled certain default options for your convenience, it is important to note that each language has unique grammar and vocabulary rules. A little tweak here and there will make your QA process more efficient. In general, you should focus on the following:

• Segment Verification: There may be an issue worth investigating if your source and target texts are identical or too different in length. Put these options to use and pinpoint the problems in your translation.

• Inconsistencies: Turn this on to verify if the same source texts are translated differently. You can also see 2 more options to check for unintentionally repeated words and unedited fuzzy matches (translations generated from Translation Memory that, mostly, should be revised).

• Punctuation: Most languages discourage using a trailing space at the end of a sentence or before punctuation. Checking these boxes will help you identify any sloppy work.

• Numbers: What would happen to the patient if a doctor prescribes two pills per day and your translation suggests three? Choosing the following options will guarantee that the patient (and you) won’t get into trouble.

• Terminology Verifier: If you have a Termbase added, don’t forget to turn this on to verify if term translation is not applied.

After making the necessary adjustments, save your QA Settings by clicking the “Export Settings” as below. You can also “Import Settings” to run QA in other projects.

Running “Verify”

Pressing this button (or the F8 key on your keyboard) will trigger a verification run in Trados according to the criteria you specified in the QA Settings. This may take a while, depending on your word count. You should expect to see a lot of errors and warning messages in the Messages tab after the progress is complete. This is what you’re supposed to do:

• Reading each message to identify issues in a segment;
• Clicking each message to jump to the problematic segment;
• Checking your translation and revising if needed.

Those just starting out may have trouble deciphering the message contents they get. You can also double-click on each message to open a separate window, read the Problem Description, and revise your Target Segment Content accordingly. Make sure to go over all of them until the translation is flawless.

And please remember that these alerts merely warn you of POTENTIAL problems in your translation, which means many of them may be “False Positives” – or simply false alarms. Just skip over them and move on to the following message, or right-click on that message and choose “Ignore Message” to make them disappear from the list. For your reference, here are some examples of False Positives.

“Dần dần” or “từ từ” means “gradually” in Vietnamese, which is a correct translation. QA Checker will always give you this warning, even if “repeated words” are common in many languages. I mean, it’s better to be safe than sorry, right?

QA Checker will alert you if the Tag order is incorrect. But, in this situation, the order of the noun “achievement” and the adjective “outstanding” is altered following Vietnamese grammar rules. So are the locations of the relevant tag pairs for each word.

CONCLUSION

By now, you should be familiar with the fundamentals of QA Checker, a built-in QA Tool of Trados. We cannot cover all possible usage cases and sophisticated settings, such as Regular Expression, in such a short article. Professional linguists should always strive to improve themselves. One of the best ways to do so is via Internet research and practical application. Plus, you should join our team of expert translators, check out our blog, or follow us on social media. Feel free to benefit from our PM and LQA Team’s assistance while you get experience working on our paid projects. Please don’t dally; write to cs_hsvn@hansem.com right away!