Translation Quality Assessment Tools and Processes in Relation to CAT Tools

Abstract

Modern translation QA tools are the latest attempt to overcome the inevitable subjective component of human revisers. This paper analyzes the current situation in the translation industry in respect to those tools and their relationship with CAT tools. The adoption of international standards has set the basic frame that defines “quality”. Because of the clear impossibility to develop a universal QA tool, all of the existing ones have in common a wide variety of settings for the user to choose from. A brief comparison is made between most popular standalone QA tools. In order to verify their results in practice, QA outputs from two of those tools have been compared. Polls that cover a period of 12 years have been collected. Their participants explained what practices they adopted in order to guarantee quality.