Quality Assurance Maintains Accuracy and Consistency in Global Law

welocalize September 10, 2018

Legal localization projects require rigorous quality assurance programs to guarantee accuracy and consistency of content lowering the risk for global clients involved in legal matters that cross international borders. Linguistic review and QA are essential in any localization program and especially when translating regulated content. QA may be one of the last steps in the overall translation process and workflow but it is the one step that ensures risk is mitigated for the end-client. Quality can mean different things to different people, both internal and external stakeholders, but for legal content, high quality is always a given. Accuracy is of utmost importance.

Park IP holds ISO 9001:2015 Certified Quality Control Process which supports the translation of nearly a billion words each year and Park IP’s unique Internal Review Board for Quality enables us to ensure all translation performed are equal to or greater than 99.955% accuracy, tracked in real-time.

A key goal for any QA program is to achieve consistency throughout all multilingual content, at every stop of the global journey. For any complex legal translation program, the client must have quality expectations in place to mitigate risk and guarantee all language variants are true to the source. Attempting to rush through a legal translation with a new provider can ultimately lead to errors and potentially inconsistencies with the source and other related content.

Measuring the quality of legal content varies considerably from other types of content, such as marketing documentation. Translating marketing content for local markets is often very subjective and often it is the marketing concept that is adapted. The content goes through a transcreation process, often using linguistic copywriters and not translators, who culturally adapt the content to suit each market’s tastes and preferences. For legal content, whether patent prosecution, trademark translation or IP document review, the quality and accuracy must be high and the professional translator must be highly qualified in legal matters as well as being a native speaker of the target language.

Measuring QA can be tricky, as quality levels will vary across product range, content type, country, language and overall localization objectives. For global social media listening programs, where multilingual social media content is translated to assess brand reputation in multiple online markets, quality will be linguistically lower than a corporate marketing brochure and much lower than patent prosecution content. User generated content (UGC) is typically translated through machine translation (MT) to enable the “gist” of content. Many Park IP Translations clients benefit from technology-assisted-translation (TAT) to process high volumes of content to simply understand the content before they decide whether it is directly relevant to a case. In the global legal sector, this approach is often used in large eDiscovery cases at the first pass, to begin the process of identifying which documents may be of use in court proceedings. For this purpose, quality levels of this legal content may be lower than a final patent application for foreign filing.

If there are no quality measures in place, then output can vary dramatically across regions and can have catastrophic outcomes, especially if several legal language service providers have been used. QA programs allow teams to review content in context and identify any formatting, technical or performance issues. Many complex localization programs have dedicated teams with quality management and testing capabilities who drive linguistic reviews, language quality assurance and necessary testing practices – functional and linguistic – on multiple platforms to ensure quality is met across all devices.

As a Welocalize company, Park IP establishes long-term and strategic partnerships with clients. By investing in teams that work consistently and on a long-term basis with clients, testers, translators, linguists, interpreters and designers can all build a strong knowledge base about a client’s legal matters and specialist areas. This ultimately improves the overall quality of translated output, significantly reducing risk for clients and strengthening a brand’s presence, consistently, across all regions.