Smartcat has designed a metric system to assess translation quality and make it an integral part of your translation workflows. We call it translation quality score.
To the right, you can see an overall translation quality score with specific details on the translation project and the option to invite colleagues or linguists from Smartcat Marketplace to improve it further.
What is translation quality score and how is it calculated?
Translation quality score is a number ranging from 0 to 100. Essentially, it provides a quick overview of how good your translation is.
To determine the score, Smartcat uses a proprietary combination of AI-based approaches that uses the power of large language models (LLM) and machine learning-based quality assessment techniques. Smartcat designed this metric system to be reliable and trustworthy, while also being reasonably fast to apply at large scale.
How to interpret translation quality score
Here are the scoring ranges and their corresponding categories for translation quality.
Some notes to keep in mind
0 – 49: A score in this range is most likely the result of a complete mistranslation or that it is a significant departure from the original meaning or formatting.
95 – 100: In this top range, any further translation edits will most likely be subjective and won’t improve the score.
3 steps to use translation quality score to improve quality
Smartcat highlights your translation quality score for a given language pair or for a translation project overall. This acts as a means to understand the quality level of your translation and help you decide how to proceed. Both AI translation and manual translation may require adjustments.
Here are three steps to improve translation quality score.
Step 1: Address any immediate issues
Ensure the translation has no obvious mistakes. Smartcat highlights critical issues such as lack of formatting tags or placeholders, mistranslation of glossary terms, or punctuation issues.
Step 2: Proofread to compare source and target texts
Ensure the translation accurately reflects the source text with a proofreading step.
Some issues to look out for include making a translation too short or too long, or over-translating – adding extra content or explanations that were not there in the source. Such issues, which are not faithful to the source text, result in a lower translation quality score.
Step 3: Ensure target formatting and punctuation is accurate
Proofreading doesn't just apply to language. It is essential to also ensure that punctuation and formatting mirrors the source language file.
For instance, providing a translation in upper case while the source is lower case negatively affects translation quality score.
Additionally, when proofreading, aim to guarantee translation fluency and that it uses proper grammatical gender.
In your Smartcat workspace, you can review translations yourself or invite your colleagues to carry out this step. You can also hire a professional linguist from Smartcat Marketplace. All users can collaborate on the same files, inside the same private workspace.
In all cases, translation quality score is the ultimate measure of the quality of the translation work performed and the faithfulness of the translated target language to the original source language.
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