A day in the life of a Quality Manager

You would be forgiven for thinking that the localization industry is made up of mostly translators. The reality, however, is that there are dozens of specialists involved in a translation project, from project managers and subject matter experts, to reviewers and even developers. One particular role - which perhaps doesn't come under the spotlight too often - is that of a Quality Manager, whose role it is to ensure that our linguistic teams provide the best possible service to our clients. Here, Jan Nohovec explains what his daily responsibilities look like and what it means to be one of our Linguistic Quality Managers.

Hello! My name is Jan. I come from the Czech Republic and for the past five years I’ve been working in Linguistic Services and Quality Management at RWS. My background is in translation and localization, as is the case with many of my colleagues. Considering how varied our job is, however, we often get new team members from many other areas. And variety is definitely what our job is about!

The core is always linguistics and linguistic data – we study translations delivered from teams across the business and provide audits on various languages. We analyze statistics on the most frequent, important or reoccurring types of corrections. We also advise our clients on which quality methodologies are the best choice for their content since different texts have different audiences with different expectations. After that, a lot comes down to communication with translators and helping them to produce the best possible quality for our clients. Talking to the individual translator involved always helps us get to the bottom of the issue and to define an improvement plan. Reporting on the situation and the solutions, both internally and to our clients, is then just the icing on the cake. But there are also many other behind-the-scenes actions that we take.

A big part of our job is making sure that linguistic references (translation memories, glossaries, machine translation engines or training materials) are all updated and working properly. We also spend a lot of time on building QA tools and are involved in the development of project management tools, CAT tools and other technologies that make work easier and way more efficient for us and our linguists, allowing them to spend time on actual linguistics.

Finally, we also work on defining processes. If a linguist has a question about the source text, for example, what is the most efficient way to get it answered correctly? And if a target user of an app has found a localization issue, how can we receive their feedback and implement a fix?

And all that is only localization. As our industry grows and develops, a part of my team has spent the last couple of years involved in machine learning. They oversee linguists who are coaching virtual assistants to understand users’ commands, teaching algorithms how to identify the song that has been stuck in your head since you woke up this morning, or training machines to use a couple of words to describe what’s on an image in case you are visually impaired or your internet is too slow to download it.

Whenever I tell my friends and family that I’m in charge of translation quality, everybody always imagines that I proofread people’s texts. In a way this is not wrong but, as you can see, there is way more to it. Overall I see my role as supporting, and by that I mean supporting our linguists to provide the best possible translation for our clients.