QA Distiller AUTOMATED TRANSLATION QUALITY CONTROL

Proudly developed by Yamagata Europe

YAMAGATA EUROPE

| Thomas Vackier | March 23, 2011

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

YAMAGATA EUROPETranslating Knowledge

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

What do we do?

Core business

We write

We translate

We do the layout

We print

We package & ship

We create software

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

On what scale do we do it?

Size matters

Team of 50 people

Pool of 1000 language vendors

Translate about 400,000 words a day

Translate into 50 languages

Layout 450 pages a day

18,000 publications a day

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

How it all startedand got completely out of hand

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Finding errors manually

The European way

PLAIN BORING

SUBJECTIVE

PRONE TO OVERSIGHTS

NOT EVERYTHING IS CHECKED DUE TO TIME CONSTRAINTS

LABOUR INTENSIVE

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Finding errors manually

The Japanese way

Our Japanese colleagues were able to find more mistakes

Even in languages they didn't understand

Very methodical

Extremely consistent

Still very costly

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

AUTOMATEWhat you can objectively measure,

you can automate

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Enter QA Distiller

First version developed in 2003

We gain time

We check everything

We check objectively

We check in the same way

We have reports

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What can QA Distiller check?

Supported checks

OMISSIONS

INCONSISTENCIES

FORMATTING

TERMINOLOGY

CUSTOM PATTERNS

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

What can’t it check?

Human revision still needed!

Caveat

GRAMMAR

STYLE

SPELLING*

TRANSFER OF MEANING

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Input formats & languages

Formats & languages

BILINGUAL

TERMINOLOGY

TTX (Trados TagEditor) TMX (Translation Memory eXchange)

XLIFF (including SDL XLIFF used in SDL Studio)

DICT (created from Excel using QA Distiller) TBX (TermBase

eXchange)

Bilingual Word not supported

LANGUAGES More than 70, including RTL and CJK

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Omissions

Omissions

EMPTY

FORGOTTEN

SKIPPED

PARTIALLY FORGOTTEN

TOO SHORT/LONG

Spaces or nothing

Source = Target

Untouched

Parts left untranslated

Percentage

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Inconsistencies

Inconsistencies

TARGET LANGUAGE

SOURCE LANGUAGE

Switch the unit ON has been translated differently

1 time(s) as

Schakel

het toestel

aan 1 time(s) as

Schakel

het toestel

uit

Schakel

het toestel

aan has been used for 2 different source

segments 1 time(s) for

Switch the unit ON

1 time(s) for

Switch the unit OFF

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Formatting

Language independent

SPACING ISSUES

PUNCTUATION

BRACKETS

TABS

CAPITALISATION

Double, extra leading, trailing

Double, end of segment

Non-matching pairs

Different count

Initial, entire

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Formatting

Language dependent

CORRUPT CHARACTERS

SPACING

NUMBERS

QUOTATION MARKS

MEASUREMENT SYSTEM

Garbled letters like �,⃞

Required, forbidden

Values, formatting

Non-matching, type

Type, conversion

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Terminology

Proprietary dictionary and TBX

EXCEL

OPEN OFFICE

SDL MULTITERM 2009

TERMWEB

Convert to DICT using QA Distiller

Free plug-in to export to TBX

Export to TBX

Export to TBX

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Custom patterns

Search and Regular Expressions

SEARCH

REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

Source and/or Target

Report patterns

Ignore patterns

Make your own checks!

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

REPORTSShare error logs

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

THE CURSEof the

FALSE POSITIVESand how to avoid it

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

PROFILESShare settings

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

BATCH REPLACEDo more in less time

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

A SAMPLE PROJECTGarbage in, garbage out quality out

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

THE FUTUREThe future is bright, and regex-flavoured

Get in Touch!

thomas@yamagata-europe.com@QADistiller

@YamagataEurope

Wednesday, March 23, 2011