1. TAUS Best Practices
Quality and the Translator
Guidelines
June 2013

2. Helping Translators to Deliver the
Expected Quality
WHY ARE TAUS INDUSTRY GUIDELINES NEEDED?
By defining best practices for translators’ kits, customer
specific briefings, and communicating expectations these
guidelines clarify the responsibilities of buyers and translation
agencies in ensuring translators deliver the desired/expected
quality.
These guidelines are intended for the localization segment.
We assume that translators/service providers are already in
place (i.e. screened and recruited, certified where necessary).
We cover the main actions required to create a successful
working environment and thus a successful translation. We do
not cover the management of translation memories (TM) and
terminology resources in any detail within these guidelines.

3. Best Practice Guidelines
Provide translation briefs/kits/instructions
• Make sure instructions are clear, precise, and concise. Be willing to pay an
additional fee for reading a high volume of reference material.
• Separate linguistic and technical instructions, as they are often handled by
different teams.
• Clearly communicate volumes and schedules upfront.
• Have an agreed change management process in place. For example by
outlining who, how and when TM/glossary changes will be made.
• Assign someone in your team to respond to queries rapidly and
effectively.
• It is important to specify the final user/audience of the material to
translate.
• Provide information on stylistic requirements, purpose of the material to
be translated, tone of voice, preferred terminology, numbers to be
localized and names to be transliterated.

4. Translation buyers should directly brief translators
about their products, services and vocabulary.
• Provide training on the product or alternatively
marketing or documentation about the product.
Briefing by provided during periodic face-to-face
meetings involving your in-country teams and
translation partners or via online meetings.
• Make sure that you establish an agreed terminology
database for all target languages in advance, that this
glossary is provided to all translators, and that you
have someone on-site to answer queries on
terminology and update the database in regularly.

5. Ensure translators are given training on the
tools they are required to use.
• Provide training on the tool to be used during
localization if it is not a standard tool. If it is a
standard tool make sure you describe your
preferred settings in the brief.
• If you are using your own MT system and post-
editing, offer an online training session.

6. Set quality expectations and communicate evaluation
criteria before translation begins
• Establish clear rules for each quality level (in case of
different desired levels of quality for post-editing, for
example). See TAUS Post-Editing MT Guidelines.
• Set a quality evaluation schedule to follow and ensure
you have a trained evaluation team in place
• If a subsidiary or in-country office will review the final
translated product, ensure they are in contact with the
translator/service provider from the outset to avoid
rework after translation is completed

7. Implement a CAPA (Corrective Action
Preventive Action) process.
• Best practice is for there to be a process in
place to deal with quality issues - corrective
action processes along with preventive action
processes. Examples might include the
provision of training or the improvement of
terminology management processes.
• Ask translators for feedback in post-mortem
meetings or through questionnaires.

8. Our Thanks To:
Ana Guerberof (Pactera) for drafting these guidelines.
The following organizations for reviewing and refining the
Guidelines at the TAUS Quality Evaluation Summit 15
March 2013, Dublin:
• ABBY Language Services, Amesto, Autodesk, Capita
Translation &
Interpreting, CNGL, Concorde, Crestec, Crosslang, Europ
ean Commission, EMC, Google, Jensen
Localization, Lingo24, Microsoft, SAP, Spil
Games, Symantec, Tekom, WCS Group, Welocalize.

9. Consultation and Publication
A public consultation was undertaken between
16 May and 7 June 2013. The guidelines were
published on 19 June 2013.
Feedback
To give feedback on improving the
guidelines, please write to dqf@tauslabs.com.