Job Reviews: GoCheck Error Types

What is a GoCheck?

One important part of our quality management system is the GoCheck—a tool we use to assess the quality of translations and provide constructive feedback to the translators that helps them grow and improve.

 

Gengo Reviewers assess translations by reviewing them for errors, marking them according to Gengo's error types classification. The GoCheck system automatically calculates a final quality score from 0.0 to 10.0 for each translation based on its total word count, number of errors, and error severity. (Read more on How does Gengo measure quality.) This screenshot of the GoCheck platform shows the options a reviewer will see when selecting an error type:

In addition to errors, Language Specialists also have the ability to add suggestions that will not deduct any points and are purely for your information and to help you improve your translations.

 

What does Gengo look for in a translation?

At Gengo, we focus on providing translations with a human voice that sound natural in the target language.

 

We are aware that different translators have different writing styles, and could translate the same text with different stylistic or phrasing choices, both resulting in translations that sound equally natural to a native speaker. These differences in style or phrasing are not deemed mistakes, as we cannot quantify these aspects objectively or support them a specific grammatical rule.

 

On the other hand, an unnatural translation containing strange wording or phrasing that objectively sounds "too unnatural" to the ear of a native speaker would be marked as an error.

 

What are the Error Severities?

Gengo uses the concept of “low,” “medium” and “critical” to divide errors based on their severity. This is the most important part of error classification and it is based on how much an error affects the  translation: 

• Low level: Minor errors that make the translation less accurate but do not lead to a significant shift in the meaning of the target text or compromise the intelligibility of a translated segment.

• Medium level: Medium errors are major failures in accuracy, compliance, or language, which jeopardize the meaning of a translated segment, including misrepresentation of the source or a clearly ungrammatical rendering of the target.

• Critical level: Critical errors are "immediate fails" that change the meaning of the original text in a highly visible part of the translation, or "Show stoppers", e.g. misrepresentations that may carry legal, safety, health, financial consequences. Omission of a sentence or section of the source text is also considered as a Critical mistake.

Repeated identical errors* will be marked only once but categorized at a higher severity tier. For example, if the same word or phrase is mistranslated more than once throughout a job, only one of the instances of the error will be marked, but it will be marked with a higher level of severity than if the error had appeared only once. This is to reflect the damage that is caused by the repetition of the error.

*Please be aware that 'identical errors' refers to instances where the same word or phrase from the source text is mistranslated in the same way in the target text. All other errors will be marked and evaluated separately.

 

What are the Error Types?

There are seven types of errors that our reviewers can mark in the GoCheck system: