TAUS is a member organization and resource center for the global translation sector. In 2011 TAUS started working with a group of 15 enterprise members to develop a platform for sharing best practices in translation quality evaluation. This has resulted in the Dynamic Quality Framework (DQF) which consists of a knowledge base, online tools and reporting for translation quality evaluation and a content profiling tool. DQF was released for TAUS members at the beginning of 2013. Today all DQF resources and tools will be made available on a simple monthly subscription basis to all stakeholders in the global translation industry, buyers of translation, students and academia.
“Working with many of our members we have learned that assessing translation quality is the single biggest challenge in the translation industry,” says Jaap van der Meer, director of TAUS. “Most companies work with a static – one translation quality fits all purposes – approach to translation quality. And when it comes to measuring that quality they fall back on counting linguistic errors. But linguistic errors do not always or rarely say much about tone, style and other important quality factors. The increased usage of translation technology and the emergence of new dynamic content complicate the translation quality challenge even further. Buyers and providers of translation services need to be able to go up and down in quality. They need to deliver a dynamic service: a translation quality that matches the purpose of the communication.”
TAUS DQF combines a very rich knowledge base with a content profiling wizard and a set of online evaluation tools that deliver relative scoring and reports on translation quality. In addition to ‘classical’ error typology-based evaluation, DQF offers tools for adequacy and fluency evaluation, ranking and comparison and productivity measurement. Most TAUS members use the DQF tools for the evaluation of machine translation output, but DQF can also be used for the evaluation of human translations.
“TAUS members appreciate the fact that DQF brings common sense to translation quality evaluation”, says Attila Görög, product manager for DQF at TAUS. “Using the same language to talk about quality, applying the same metrics and being able to compare apples with apples. The standard reporting in DQF opens the way to benchmarking translation quality on an industry scale. That is the goal of DQF: bringing more business intelligence to the translation industry. This will help the industry to grow and innovate faster.”