The Magical Mystery Word

For the last few years quality has been one the most important business. An increasing numbers of companies have been committing themselves to implementing quality management systems.

Quality is indeed one of the two favorite topics of linguists in the industry, the other being rates.

Il presente articolo è stato estratto dal blog "The Big Wave" , una rivista trimestrale dedicata alle tecnologie linguistiche, pubblicata da sQuid

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For the last few years quality has been one the most important business. An increasing numbers of companies have been committing themselves to implementing quality management systems.

Quality is indeed one of the two favorite topics of linguists in the industry, the other being rates.

Not surprisingly, the positions of translation entrepreneurs and linguists regarding these two topics have always been quite different.

Translation buyers are susceptible to translation quality to the extent that they perceive the translation product as useful to their business goals.

Therefore they could be interested in providers being ready and equipped to offer one-stop service to their customers, especially the so-called value-added services.

On the other hand, most individual translators may be willing to take on work from would-be standing customers and would go for basic services only, as they can´t afford to serve also as revisers, checkers, spokespersons, accountants, graphic artists, typesetters, web site developers, software engineers, etc. all at once.

EN 15038:2006The first translation quality management standard was UNI 10574:1996. In the previous years, in spite of the great number of documents, articles, and books about quality, little attention had been paid to quality management in the translation industry. Then came the ATA Taalmerk (1997), the DIN 2345 (1998), and the ÖN D 1200/1201 (2000).

In spite of what was happening in other industries, though, the translation industry standards in effect at the time of the drafting of EN 15038:2006 did not seem to receive any special attention from translation buyers, who were showing no special interest in certified vendors.

Almost a decade ago, spurred by the increasing interest in quality management systems, the European Committee for Standardization summoned a task force to draft a translation industry standard. Three years later the EN 15038:2006 was born.

In the June 2002 issue of the ATC newsletter, Robin Brown wrote that the original idea behind EN 15038:2006 was to formulate a standard purely for translation companies, one that would enable them to differentiate themselves from freelancers, ‘letterbox agencies’ and the less desirable Internet translation portals.

More recently, Demid Tishin, GALA’s representative at ISO TC 37 (the body that worked on the brand-new ISO/TS 11669 technical specification), declared that ISO 9001 was a too broad quality management standard, that did not specify translation services and was not hugely popular.

In fact, the majority of translation companies (mostly run by linguists) considered — and actually still consider — ISO 9000s standards as unfit to address the specificity of the translation process, which they see crucial in determining quality outcomes.

Even though the standard was released only two years later the draft was finalized, it reflected — and actually still reflects — a typical business model in the industry, with the manifest goal to freeze it in a still picture.

In the industry, EN 15038:2006 is seen as a general framework for buyers and vendors of translation services, to help buyers understand the translation processes and their specificity, thus leading them to a mindful, thoughtful, and respectful approach to translation services.

However, if the standard’s goal is to describe the “best practices” for creating high-quality translation services and help customers to find the most suitable service, the premise is unfair.

EN 15038:2006 is a misleading picture of a century-old scenario, binding TSPs to an obsolete model rather than offering them the flexibility of a quality management system. This standard fails to open the practice of translation services to the changing realities of the industry.

Translation services present indeed a variety of situations and tasks that are hard to systematize and represent once and for all. This is the intrinsic weakness of the standard, and its failure in depicting the specificity of the industry. EN 15038:2006 just defines the lowest common denominator of the industry.

Like many other manufacturing companies at the dawn of quality management systems, today TSPs look at compliance and certification as a means to foster a positive perception in customers, as this was — and is —the rationale for EN 15038:2006.

Implementing a Translation Quality SystemToday, speed and agility are the main drivers. Costs become truly important only when both requirements are met. Customers ask TSPs to be relevant to their processes. To keep pace with the changing situation more flexible business models are necessary for TSPs of any size and nature.

Quality means doing it right the first time. It also means having efficient processes in place and best-in-class people at work.

In spreading the standards, ISO itself advises that ISO 9000s can be implemented without certification, simply for the quality benefits that can be achieved.

This article is aimed at providing readers with an introduction to the actual implementation of an entry-level translation quality system.

StandardizationFor every service product, the production process itself is a critical determinant of quality. Every production process must comply with process requirements: work methods, tools, controls, or operator qualifications.

To maintain a consistent way of working, to assign staff from one process to another and reduce confusion four standardizing mechanisms can be implemented:

1. standardization of work outputs, by establishing product requirements for each product;
2. standardization of processes, by standardizing the tasks to be accomplished through the methods and procedures for accomplishing and managing the work effort;
3. standardization of work inputs, by establishing standards for each product used in a process, ensuring that all players provide inputs meeting requirements;
4. standardization of work skills, by establishing job descriptions and skill requirements for each task to be accomplished, and training workers accordingly.

The last mechanism is the hardest to implement, especially for organizations with heavy labor turnover, such as translation companies, which traditionally rely heavily on outsourcing.

For business processes to produce the expected outcomes (i.e. have the product pass as it is), all the following elements are necessary:

• basic skills for job completion;
• appropriate and correct information about the job;
• accurate and suitable tools and materials to fulfill the job;
• a well-suited environment.

Drawbacks and ReturnsQuality standards have helped spread the mistaken certainty that a certification is in itself a warranty of the outstanding quality of the products of a certified company.

Quality standards give general guidelines on how to document business procedures. Consequently, certification can only state that customers of a certified company will receive the required goods or services in accordance with the agreed terms.

Certification tells nothing about quality of products, while the end user’s exclusive interest is actually in the quality of products rather than in the means used to assure it.

It is especially important to inform and have the staff and the clients on your side. In fact, another major risk is to go for certification without the actors of procedures and their recipients being involved. Suggestion of changes from the staff and the clients could prove even more important than the accreditation received from consultants and certifiers. It is equally important, however, not to go for quality assurance just to meet the demands or the requirements of specific clients: quality assurance must be a company’s choice in itself.

ISO 9000s are ‘objective’ standards, as they can actually be applied to any organization. In fact, they are centered around the procedures implemented within an organization to ensure quality, i.e. how to establish a system aimed at ensuring quality.

For ISO 9000s certification, any organization must follow four basic rules:

1. Write down what you do.
2. Do what you have written.
3. Substantiate what you have done.
4. Reflect on how to improve it.

ISO 9000s certification can only state that a compliant system is in place, not that the end result is guaranteed to be of (high) quality.

BasicsISO 9000s set up abstract indications pertaining to concepts, tools, and processes, thus requiring to be adjusted to a specific domain or production organization.

The foundation of a quality management system is the quality policy and the documentation of the whole system (where processes are settled and described according to the principles and criteria of the standard). The definition of the quality policy and the documentation of the quality management system are set through the quality manual as the outcome of process reengineering and description, together with the activity aiming at monitoring and keeping the overall quality produced by the system at the expected level.

The main hindrance in implementing quality management standards comes from the difficulty in formalizing production processes, updating procedures, and spreading new working instructions.

The path to certification leads in most cases to an inefficiency awareness and, where corrections are made, to a considerable reduction of costs or, in a broader perspective, to better results, since the quality of the final product is the result of the production process as a whole. This is always accompanied by a general increase of production efficiency with minor organizational impact.

Certification could boost customers’ confidence, even though this should not be a reason for certification to be imposed as a pre-requisite to keep the working liaison alive, which could, on the contrary, void any positive effects.

In any case, the crucial step in setting up quality systems is the implementation of monitoring, auditing, and testing, to ensure product compliance with the pre-requisites through the production process.

Once gained, certification will have to be kept/maintained. To this end, an independent authority will periodically audit the quality management system for conformity.

The Quality ManualDocumentation is pivotal in the operation of a quality management system. When seeking certification to ISO 9000s, the real work is in documentation: without a well-documented quality management system, certification would be impossible. The very core of this work is the planning, preparation, use and adaptation of a detailed quality manual, which sets out systems and procedures for all the people involved. Without guidance or experience, however, there are many pitfalls.

The quality management system must be tailored to the needs of the organization, since its purpose is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization and act as a practical reference guide to everyone involved in the processes. Therefore, the quality manual must relate to the organization it represents and describe actual processes the way they are carried out.

Writing the ManualBefore starting writing the quality manual and applying for certification, some order should be brought to the hundreds of papers that have been collected over the years and possibly archived and stored.

A quality manual will prove worth the effort of writing even if you´re not seeking a certification. The disciplines established by ISO 9000s force organizations to think through how they operate and to keep control of what they do. When the manual is already available,  the decision whether to apply for certification is certainly simplified. Certification becomes, as it should be, a means towards improving quality and efficiency, not an marketing effort/tool.

Even for an individual translator, the quality manual could be simply a sort of elaborate checklist tracing out the process of translating a document from the first contact with a customer to delivery of the completed translation and any post-completion service.

The major benefit in documenting one’s activity comes actually from writing things down that makes them clearer and easier to evaluate while weak points stand out.

The second benefit is that breaking down the process into discrete units helps focus attention to really important things.

A third, although virtual, benefit of documenting processes comes from the capability of managing potential disrupting or quirky requests as documentation should encompass a description of how to track the amount of jobs to be handled at the moment and the volume envisaged to be managed without suffering.

Documentation for the quality manual consists of three parts reflecting the levels of the quality management system:

1. the quality policy manual, covering all the quality policies and plans from the top level of the organization; it is actually a set of very general statements about the organization’s conduct, a kind of public noticeboard for people inside and outside the organization, defining the systems in terms of goals and structure;
2. the quality procedures manual, covering the procedures that are developed and implemented at the intermediate level of the organization; it sets up a model for the organization detailing operations, from the management processes to the procedures to be followed to work smoothly and evenly;
3. the workplace references, comprising all documents necessary to carry out operating tasks, e.g. the reference materials used to perform standard jobs and often forgotten about.

ISO 9000s pose strict terms as to controlling business processes. Documentation, through each stage, should detail client, reference, allocated staff, specific instructions, order of priority, deadlines and dispatch requirements to constantly track the progress of the job. Finally, at each stage of the production process feedback should be given on the previous stage, exceptions reported and jeopardies removed or corrected before releasing the final product. The quality procedures manual could detail the service agreement between the organization and its customers, stating all requirements and any changes made to the job during completion.

A translation quality management system should be conceived to have quality levels clearly defined in requirements and qualifications. An exception report should account for any deviations from a predefined model and highlight jeopardies.

Obviously, the manual has to be updated as requirements change, even for a relatively minor change, from terminology to layout, dispatch procedures, etc.

Further Readings A Contrarian’s View on Translation Standards