Quality management is still a pending subject of prime importance in the translation sector. Although there are different quality standards for the production of linguistic services, it is also true that the evolution of the GILT sector (Globalisation, Internationalisation, Localisations, Translation), and market globalisation in general, increase the need for a unifying regulation for the companies of the sector. In this sense, the European Standard CEN/BTTF 138, which is about to come out, is a sign of the need for unification and quality control in the translation production sector.

Beyond the standards, the importance of quality management is deducted from the development of tools whose purpose is to automate quality control and which, as we will see later, have limited functions.

In this issue aimed at quality management, in addition to insisting on the need to control terminology management as a quality strategy, we present some linguistic resources of great value for language professionals, and the latest achievement in research and development within STAR Servicios Lingüísticos.

          Editing Committee:

     The translation production sector will soon have a new unifying standard for all companies in the sector in Europe. We refer to the EN-15038. This standard came out in 2002 and is likely to be posted in early 2006 by the European Standardisation Committee. It is intended to bring together European proposals to achieve the establishment of a common European standard applicable to all translation service providers, both translation companies and freelance translators. The initiative arises from the European Union Association of Translation Companies —EUATC —. AENOR, the Spanish association of standardisation has assumed the management of the project spread over different tasks performed by different companies. In this way, the German workgroup deals with establishing the terms and definitions of the sector; the Austrian team has established the basic technical and human requirements to offer translation services; the Finnish team has defined the relationship between the customer and the service provider (framework contract, obligations and rights of the parties); the Spanish group has prepared the administrative, linguistic, technical and terminological procedures of the translation services; and finally, the English group has defined the value added service for the translation environment.

These quality control procedures in professional services of multilingual content production have an institutional and private background, which we mention below:

• ISO 9000, 9001, 9002, contemplate standards to guarantee quality in the industrial process. From these standards, it is understood that there are certain elements that the whole quality system must have under control in order to guarantee that quality products and services are generated consistently and in time. The ISO 9000 series was created between 2000 and 2002 by committees made up of representatives from 27 countries, dealing with the necessary updates. It has been accepted by more than 70 countries around the world as the most widely accepted standard that establishes requirements for quality systems. It is not specific to the area of translation.

• ISO 2384, posted in 1977, establishes the rules for the standard presentation of translations in order to facilitate their use by the different categories of users.
• LISA QA 3.0, a model standard brought out in 1995, establishes a series of standards proposed by the LISA association for the quality management and control in the localisation process of all the components of a product.
• UNI 10574, an Italian standard published in 1995, describes for the first time activities related to translation and interpretation in the European environment for quality control, specifically for translation services. The body responsible for their publication is UNITER (Organismo di Normazione e di Certificazione di Sistemi di qualità italiano).
• DIN 2345, released in 1998 by the German standardisation institute (Das Deutsche Institut für Normung), proposes specific standards for the management of translation and localisation projects. A focus is made on the translation process and the business management of these projects. It attends organisational aspects and budgets, contracts, forms of delivery, confidentiality agreements, amongst other things. This standard also deals with content aspects related to control of translations and interaction with customers.

All of these proposals, applied to quality control, also show some of the workflows related to the industrial process of multilingual content production. This is precisely what is behind the following section, describing tasks that are related to the translation phase.

    The pursuance of spelling and typing mistakes or errors of interpretation in corrections is not only an essential condition for delivering high quality products to the customer who orders translations, but allows the procedures of the providers of these services to be evaluated fairly precisely.

This pursuance is carried out automatically and manually. The most common automatic quality control functions are given to the spelling, terminology checkers or format labels that control the structures and characteristics of formatting the translated documents with respect to the originals — these functions are normally assumed by importing and exporting filters, also known as converters —.

For a company engaged in the production of multilingual technical documentation, these functions that automate some quality control procedures are essential. However, it is also necessary to be aware that these automatic functions are limited, as they lack the necessary semantic knowledge to clarify certain spelling mistakes or errors in interpretation.

     For STAR Servicios Lingüísticos, S.L. the efficient management of terminological linguistic resources and translation memories is a key element to controlling quality. The strategy of manually weighting the reliability of the stored linguistic resources and marking their macrostructures with semantic information accelerates their clear accessibility, thus increasing the quality of the end product. This manual procedure does not guarantee full quality, but it does optimise the production process. The final quality will always depend, in the last term, on the human factor.

    The GILT industry offers a wide range of services from content management (creation, edition, publication), that is, documentation management, by applying internationalisation and localisation techniques, to the design and development of tools that manage contents in different languages (systems of assisted translation, terminological managers, converters, aligners, extractors, correctors, terminology banks, on-line corpus, etc.). This emerging industry, driven by the great increase in needs for translation and technical and cultural adaptation to other markets increases its volume of services due to:

• the legal provisions of ever more countries for the products to be documented and localised for the target market;

• the advantage of localised products over the competition;
• the need for ever more sophisticated technology to be described in order to better exploit their usage and operation.

    Beyond the relevance of terminology in standardising a language, efficient terminology management plays a decisive role in the development of high quality products for multinational markets, as shown by the report by Kara Warburton, IBM terminologist, in the last conference of the LISA association, which took place in November in Zurich.

• Linguistic resources of Leipzig University: Leipzig University has given users a series of multilingual linguistic resources. This is undoubtedly more than a dictionary and more than a corpus. It has resources in German, English, French, Dutch, Serbian and Icelandic. However, the resources in German are particularly relevant. From one word, we are presented with a list of associated words, synonyms, compound words, concordances, that is, which words accompany and how often they accompany the selected chain. As if this were not enough, we are offered a visual representation of these concordances in graphic form too, such as the parabolas that represent functions in the area of analytical mathematics.
  

  This may be consulted at:
  http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/

• Terminology databases from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra: the UPF_TERM terminological database is an electronic resource for the consultation and diffusion of terminological works drawn up by students of the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting of the University Institute of Applied Linguistics and other work and research centres of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
  The UPF_TERM bank, housed in a database server used exclusively for this purpose is a free access resource for pupils, teachers and researchers of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and users from outside the University. The username and password for consultation are on the pages describing the bank, accessible through the IULA linguistic resource portal (http://www.iula.upf.edu).
  UPF_TERM currently has more than 5,000 registers in different languages, mainly Catalan, Spanish, English and French, amongst others, and spread around different thematic areas. When you enter the bank, the consultation interface may be loaded in several languages (Catalan, Spanish, English, French and German). The UPF_TERM bank is implemented with the WebTerm technology by the company STAR.
  

     On 20th December 2005, Lidia Cámara received her PHD suma cum laude in Applied Linguistics from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. The thesis has the title: Multilingual technical communication: management of knowledge and linguistic resources for translation projects. This doctoral thesis is a piece of applied, interdisciplinary research work that is intended to design and implement an optimisation system for managing the linguistic resources of translation and localisation projects, that is, translation memories and terminological dictionaries, in a translation company. It is a question of replying to the information management problems that currently appear, with the exponential increase in documents generated in a complex organised situation, taking the example of the case of STAR Servicios Lingüísticos. In addition to offering a solution to the problems presented and to describing the theoretical bases of the LR management system currently implemented in the company, it is of eminently didactic value.

This research project is another landmark in the working line of STAR Servicios Lingüísticos, intended to join the forces of private business and public university to promote the training of language professionals. It culminates six years of co-operation with different teaching institutions. In these years the company has given courses in masters degree programmes, has designed its own programme of courses on technical knowledge for translators, and localised, along with Barcelona Autonomous University, the programmes Transit and TermStar in Catalan. Therefore, it is an honour that in addition to achieving public institutional recognition through the defence of the thesis, the work has been recommended for publication by all of the members of the thesis evaluation panel. Lidia Cámara's thesis is not only an example of consistency in her work, but also public exaltation of the excellence of the work in STAR Servicios Lingüísticos.