Quality Metric for Language Translation of Service Information
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This site was established to provide information on the development of a quality metric for foreign language translations of automotive service information.
Background
Up to now, quality measurement on language translation in the automotive industry has largely been subjective, if such measurement was undertaken at all. If an automotive company did set up a quality process with its translation suppliers, the quality of translated service information would generally be reviewed by in-country validators designated by the automotive company. Markups of the translated documents were provided back to the translation supplier for correction and editing. There would likely not be any standardized measurement metrics for determining or rating quality in a manner similar to methods used in the manufacturing side of the automotive business.
Task Force Established
In an effort to establish a translation metric that could be used by automotive companies to compare quality of translation deliverables, a task force initially made up of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler representatives, together with representatives from translation suppliers, was convened in the fall of 1997. Under the auspices of the SAE E/E Diagnostic Systems Committee, Kurt Godden, then Manager of Translation Process Development at GM's Service Technology Group initiated this task force activity and identified an initial core group of representatives who, at an initial meeting, set the scope and objectives of this task force. SAE officially designated the task force as the J2450 Task Force on a Quality Metric for Language Translation of Service Information.
Scope and Objective
The scope of this task force's activity is:
To develop an industry-wide metric for the evaluation of translation quality.
To document the process of developing this metric and getting approval for it.
To communicate the metric to translation suppliers.
The objective of the metric is to establish a consistent standard against which the translation quality of automotive service information can be objectively measured
regardless of the source language,
regardless of the target language,
and regardless of how the translation is performed--i.e., human translation or machine translation.
Current Status
J2450 was updated to a standard in August 2005 which is the current publication date
Future
For 2002, both the U.S. and European task forces are testing the metric further in preparation for balloting as an SAE Standard. Automotive companies, automotive component suppliers and their translation vendors are welcome to participate.
Meetings
Following are the meeting dates scheduled for the year 2006, all meetings will be held 9:00 am - 11:00 am at SAE Automotive Headquarters, 755 West Big Beaver Road, Suite 1600, Troy, MI. Meeting room will be posted.
February 15, 2006
May 17
CANCELED-May 30 - In Barcelona
August 16
November 15
Chairperson
Elizabeth Bergeron
Email: lbergeron@omnilingua.com
Phone: 319-892-8104
Fax: 319-365-7893
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