What is administrative quality for freelance translators?

Today I would like to go a bit deeper into my previous post about quality assurance for freelance translators, or any type of freelancer. I will start with administrative quality. This is again based on information I have received from the Swedish Association for Professional Translators (http://www.sfoe.se/).

All work is easier if you use structure and routines to improve quality. It is important to organize your work and not change routines that work very often, especially routines for accepting jobs, registering jobs, purchase orders, organization of your translation work, project management, deadlines, delivery, invoicing and accounting.

Without administrative routines it is next to impossible to deal with possible complaints, since you cannot track your jobs or find proof for your case. Stress levels are elevated when you cannot find things, and the profitability decreases if you need to do rework for things you cannot find. Perhaps you forget to invoice for a job you performed, or cannot invoice properly, since you lost the purchase order.

I am not here to impose a certain way to do things for you. If you have a system that works, great! If not, try to find one that works for you. Create a filing system on your computer that makes it easy for you to find things. Use an accounting software and invoicing software. I file things by customer, project and date and also file all emails by customer. That works well for me and I can find and trace jobs easily. The most important thing is that you can go back and find that PO, that invoice, or that translation you did 11 months ago.

Do you have any other advice for administrative quality and organization? All advice welcome! Have a great, stress-free summer and good luck with organizing your business.

Four types of quality assurance for translators

The other day I received a pamphlet about quality for translators from The Swedish Association for Professional Translators (sfoe.se).



One way to make the concept of quality easier to deal with for linguists, is to divide it up into four parts: administrative quality, linguistic quality, business quality and cultural quality. International quality standards focus mostly on administrative quality, since it is the easiest to measure. Linguistic quality is the most important for language professionals. Business quality is defined as the relation to the customer, and cultural quality is when a translation speaks to the end customer/reader. All four are important for linguists and warrant further investigation.


Administrative quality:
Routines for handling translation projects, inquiry, offer, order confirmation, translation, control/check, delivery, invoicing, follow up, archiving.


Linguistic quality can only be achieved if you:
- Only accept projects that are within your expertise
- Have access to suitable, current reference material
- Use relevant tools that increase quality, for example translation memory and spell checking
- Proofread the end result carefully

Business quality can only be achieved if you:
- In advance check with the customer what they want/what is needed
- Deliver a product that fulfill the terms agreed upon

Cultural quality can only be achieved if you:
- Are thoroughly familiar with the cultural context of the source text
- Translate the text based on the cultural environment of the target language so that the text will have the same meaning.


I found these definitions very useful. It is easier to work on quality assurance if you can break it up into these aspects and follow them. What do you think? Do you have a system for quality assurance?