Standards Development

Scope

This document provides guidelines and recommendations for the assessment of human translation output and post-edited machine translation output. Its focus lies on an analytical translation assessment method using error categories and error points producing an error score. This document deliberately focusses on the assessment of the translation output only and follows a minimal complexity approach. The reason behind this approach is to keep this document applicable for as many users as possible in the translation/language industry and to not narrow down its applicability. This document does not deal with translation quality assurance, root cause analysis and corrective actions.

This document is intended to be used by TSPs (be they individual translators, translation companies or inhouse translation services), their clients and other interested parties in the language/translation industry.

This document does not apply to interpreting.

Purpose

The globalization of the world, the accompanying professionalization of translation services and the growing availability of online machine translation tools have driven the demand for standardized and harmonized principles and procedures for the assessment of translations.

In an industrial world in which products have to comply with clients’ and legal specifications, translations have to be regarded as a product that has to fulfil certain requirements. Only by the thorough comparison of the translation output (i.e. a translated text) to the original with regard to the demanded translation requirements, an objective judgment can be achieved as to whether the translation fulfils the specified requirements.

This document aims at providing guidelines and recommendations to assess a translation output of human translation output and post-edited machine translation output. The same set of guidelines and recommendations might to some extent be also applicable to the assessment of raw machine translation output.

Up until today no International Standard could establish common rules and guidelines. This International Standard aims at closing this gap.