You may know these as terminology services, term mining, glossary and style guide development, translation memory maintenance, linguist training and evaluation, tester qualification, or in-country review management.
Three services, one reason. They are necessary, they are nobody's favourite job, and they are the first things a busy quality team hands outside.
Terminology and translation memory work
Pulling the terms that matter out of your documents, building the glossary, agreeing the approved rendering of each term in each language, and cleaning the accumulated contradictions out of your translation memory.
This is worth more than it sounds, for a reason our own review work keeps demonstrating: in long documents, a large share of the errors worth fixing are one term rendered three ways. Sentence-level checking cannot see it, because every sentence is individually correct. Fixing the glossary removes the error class rather than the error.
We also write and maintain style guides, and we will tell you where your existing one contradicts itself, which is usually in register and in how proper nouns are handled.
Priced per hour, or per term.
Linguist testing and evaluation
You recruit linguists continuously. Every applicant does a test piece. Somebody qualified has to mark it — and it has to be somebody who is not competing with the applicant for the work.
We mark test pieces against a defined scorecard rather than an opinion: error type, severity, a score, and a short written judgement on whether this person should be approved, approved for a narrower subject range, or not approved. You get the reasoning, not just the verdict, because the reasoning is what you need when the applicant asks.
We can also re-evaluate linguists already on your roster, on real delivered work, which is a different and more honest test than a fresh sample piece.
Twenty years of finding and checking specialists is the only qualification that matters for this work, and it is not one that can be bought quickly.
Priced per test piece.
In-country review management
In regulated work your client's own local staff — a doctor, a lawyer, a country manager — have to sign off before publication. Managing that is slow, and it is usually the step that runs over.
We brief the reviewer properly, in their language, with a clear statement of what we are and are not asking them to change. We chase. We collect their changes, apply the ones that are corrections, query the ones that are preferences, and hand you a record of what changed and why — which is the part an auditor later asks for.
A well-briefed in-country reviewer returns a file in days rather than weeks, and returns corrections rather than rewrites. Most of that is in the briefing.
Priced per hour, or as a management fee.
Delivered, or staffed
Send us the work and we return the deliverable described above. Or place our reviewers into your own process and tooling and run them under your rubric, your schema and your brand. Same people, same documentation, different contract. Tell us which you want and we will price it that way.