Improving Quality with Linguistic Toolbox
Linguistic Toolbox is Lionbridge's automated linguistic Quality Assurance (QA) tool. It offers language professionals a range of quality measures to evaluate their content against.
When human evaluators (reviewers, editors) perform quality checks without automated tools, they face a number of limitations:
- Inconsistency – same error is not captured every time
- Incomplete – not all errors are captured
- Subjective review – human preferences affect review accuracy
- Absence of cumulative/shareable knowledge – revision experience accumulates in the evaluator’s brain; not reusable by another evaluator
- Difficult to certify quality – human subjective component
Linguistic Toolbox helps language professionals perform linguistic quality checks that include:
- Correct use of terminology and style
- Consistencies within documents and across related documents (for the same product or organization)
- Proper translation of important entities (dates, amounts, currencies, measurements, copyrighted terms, product names, people names, place names, URLs, email addresses, etc.)
- Missing translations in target files
- Full spell-check of final files
- Use of unnecessary, or even confusing, synonyms
Linguistic Toolbox offers a wide range of features and is a highly flexible tool. Its linguistic quality control potential is virtually unlimited once it has been customized for a specific type of content. Even without any customization, Linguistic Toolbox has a core subset of quality checks that can yield significant results in the daily tasks of language professionals.
Linguistic Toolbox Functionality
Quality Control
- Change Report: Compares two versions of translated files segment by segment.
- QUICK: Checks the consistency between software (UI) and documentation/help (UA) translations.
- Segment Checker: Makes several checks at the segment level, such as inconsistent translations, untranslated segments, long segments, etc.
- Spelling: Provides automated spell checking on multiple files in one run. It can also perform grammar checks in batch mode through Microsoft Word.
- Terms and Punctuation: Searches for specific linguistic errors in files, such as incorrect translations, grammar errors, punctuation errors, etc. The checks are fully customizable.
Controlled Language Components
- Source Analysis: Looks for similar source sentences with the specified amount of difference.
- Entity Extractor: Extracts the specified entities (product names, URLs, etc.) that are found in the source text.
Linguistic Toolbox provides language professionals with quality assessments throughout the localization lifecycle.