LQA

Perform quality assurance

Performing quality assurance | Smartcat Help Center Smartcat provides automated quality assurance for your convenience. The system checks various errors, including spelling, punctuation, terminology, formatting, and consistency with the translation memory while translators are working in the Editor. If an error gets detected, the system displays a warning with the error description. Project managers can view or download a QA report, which we will cover later. Setting Up Quality Assurance There are 3 levels of error criticality. They are:1. Ignore errors2. Notify me about errors3. Require error correction The default option (Notify me about errors) displays a warning (yellow triangle) in the Editor when the system detects an error in the translation. If certain kinds of error warnings distract you or do not apply to your project, you can disable them by selecting the Ignore errors option. And if you want to specify that a certain kind of error is critical, opt for Require error correction. When the kind of error specified is detected in the translation, the system will display the critical error symbol (red triangle) and will not allow the segment to be confirmed until the error is corrected. When the project has been created, open the project page and press the Settings icon. Select Set Up Quality Assurance in the General Information tab. In the new window, change the QA settings by marking or unmarking checkboxes next to the error type that you want to attune. You can mark errors as critical by marking the checkbox on the far right. To perform a QA check based on the new options, use the switch "Check all project documents for errors after the new settings are applied" at the bottom. Click Apply. The error "Target exceeds the character length limit" and all errors related to tags are critical by default and cannot be disabled. Using Quality Assurance When Working with a Text If a non-critical error is detected in a segment, a yellow icon appears in the status column (on the right) for that segment. To see what errors were found in the current segment, hover the cursor over the yellow icon or click on it to open the QA Check tab under the editing space. The checks run automatically, so some errors may turn out to be false positives. In such cases, you can check the Ignore box next to the error description in the QA Check tab to hide the yellow warning icon, or simply pay no attention to the warning icon. Note: The option to ignore a QA error is only available to the project participants who have been assigned a translation task. Project managers cannot select that option. Tip: It is good practice to ask the translators to clear all the warnings in a file by either correcting the errors or ignoring false positives before they mark the task as done. Very often, the project manager doesn't speak the target language and isn't able to determine whether warnings relate to real errors. If a spelling error is detected in the translation, it will be immediately underlined. Right-click the misspelled word to select a replacement, or add an exception to the spellcheck dictionary. You can add, edit, and remove exceptions using the button in the toolbar displayed with an “A” and a tick. The system also checks terms using the associated terminology database but takes morphology into account. This means that terms translated correctly but using a word form other than in the glossary (for example, a different tense or number) will not be regarded as errors, and you will not be distracted by false positives. Project Quality Reports To run a QA check or create a QA report for a project, go to the project page. On the project page, select the QA Check button located in the Settings tab. In the next window, you will see the list of all errors detected in the project. If you wish to check only some specific documents, check the boxes next to their names. The errors are grouped by type, so you can drill down each error type to display sub-types and the segments where these errors occur. To correct an error, follow the Go to segment link to open the file in the editor and place the cursor in the segment to be corrected or find the segment by the number specified in the report to the right of the error. To rerun the check, press the Run a check button. If you need to save a copy of the error report to your computer, select Download. Smartcat will generate an Excel spreadsheet with information about the errors found in the file and a link to open the editor from within Excel to speed up corrections.

Working with the editor in LQA Review mode

How to use LQA review mode in Smartcat Editor If you are assigned to perform an LQA (language quality assessment) review, working with the document in the editor will differ a bit from regular translation, in the following way: Your goal will be to assess existing translations, but not make any changes to them. Editor itself will be in a read-only mode, and you will only be able to highlight certain parts of the text and add comments.Once you’re done working with the segment, you need to mark the segment as complete by clicking on the confirmation button (checkmark). However, you can still add comments after marking the segment as complete. This confirmation is needed only for you to track your progress. Confirmed segments are not saved into any translation memory. When opening editor in LQA Review mode (either in a project which has only the LQA Review workflow stage, or if you are a linguist assigned to work on the LQA Review workflow stage), you will see a quick animated demo of how to work in this mode. You can click Learn more to open the documentation page you’re currently viewing. After closing this popup you can later go to this documentation page by following the Learn more about LQA Review mode link located in the top right corner of the editor: Once in the editor, go through each segment and see if there are any errors or imperfections you want to highlight and categorize. Select on any portion of the translation to see the comment button appear: Click on it, and you will be able to add a free-form comment (which is optional) and a label (which is required): When entering the label, Smartcat will present you a list of labels that indicate error type and severity. You can pick one or more labels. Start typing to reduce the list of labels and find the one faster: Once you have a label selected, click Add to close the dialog: Segments that have any comments will have this comment indicator: You can click on it to go to the Segment comments tab where you can see all of the comments you added, and can delete some comments in case you made any mistake: Once done working with the segment, click on the confirmation button to indicate your progress through the document. Once you go through all of the segments, Click the Done button in the top right corner of the editor to complete your work. This button will be greyed out until you confirm all the segments.