After stops in San Mateo, Amsterdam, Boston, and London, the annual XTM LIVE conference is coming back to Silicon Valley for 2020 with Argos Multilingual as a Platinum Partner. The conference is packed with training sessions by localization professionals, one-of-a-kind networking opportunities, and presentations by industry leaders – including our own Vice President of R&D Yves Savourel. His presentation is entitled “Answering the Challenge of Complex QA,” and here’s what he had to say about presenting at the prestigious summit:

Is there anything you can tell us about your presentation ahead of time?

Yves Savourel: The session will be about how we are working to perform QA in a consolidated way. Our customers work with different translation systems and have requirements that are sometimes very specific. Often such checks are not available with the integrated QA modules of the translation tools, or even with dedicated QA tools, so we’ve tried to come up with a flexible way to perform our QA steps. It works the same way regardless of the translation tool that produced the translation, it offers the types of checks our customer need, and we can perform the QA at different stages. The attendees should be able to get a feel on how such a system can work, see its strengths and weaknesses, and maybe take back home some ideas on how to apply it to their own QA needs.

How did your experience in the industry lead you to this particular topic?

YS: If you work in localization for a while, you quickly learn that there are a few key aspects any translation system must address to be successful – integration, automation, and quality control. Quality actually covers a lot of different sub-topics. You want to address the linguistic quality itself, the consistency across documents, how accurately the translations reflect the sources, how localizable parts of the translation have been adapted, how to evaluate the machine translation elements, etc. So, having worked on all those aspects and having experienced how important they are to customers, I can make a good case for QA to be a topic of interest for almost anyone in the translation industry.

Can you recommend any resources for people who want to dive in deeper?

YS: There are many good QA-related resources on the web – here are some examples:

• QT21 EU project is a good source: http://www.qt21.eu/
• This includes the MQM definitions: http://www.qt21.eu/mqm-definition/
• The Localization Quality Issue data category in ITS 2.0: https://www.w3.org/TR/its20/#lqissue
• Many LSPs have interesting documents about QA. You can find Argos notes on LQA here: https://www.argosmultilingual.com/what-we-do/language-translation-services/lqa
• TAUS has done quite a bit of work with DQF: https://www.taus.net/dqf

To learn more about the event, please visit the XTM live website. To set up a meeting with our VP of Global Sales Victoria Killmar, email her at victoria.killmar@argosmultilingual.com. See you there!