How does Gengo assess quality?

Who and where are your Translators?

 

Our translators are a global group of bilingual individuals who have great writing skills and love to translate. They come from all backgrounds, but share the desire to work flexibly and efficiently on translation. We have translators in every timezone of the world (we're working on every country). Our translators are often foreign nationals living in another country — for instance we have prolific Japanese-English translators living in Israel and the UK.

To view the experience level and testing requirements of our translators, visit our Quality Policy page.

 

 

How are your Translators Tested?

 

All our translators pass a 2-stage testing process, starting with a machine-tested multiple-choice test, and finishing with a human-reviewed test that is created and graded by our Language Specialists. Only around 3.6% of applicants pass the tests.

 

To get access to the higher quality level (Advanced), translators must pass additional testing which require more attention to detail and experience.

 

 

How do you hire your Language Specialists?

 

Our Language Specialists are native speakers in the target language who have professional background in translation, are carefully sourced and vetted to ensure that they follow Gengo’s quality assurance processes, and have the required knowledge and industry expertise to oversee large pools of translators. We use a multi-stage interview process and a careful evaluation of a translator’s experience before a candidate is accepted.

 

If you are interested in becoming a Language Specialist, learn more and apply here.

 

 

The Quality Assurance Process

 

We regularly perform random quality checks to evaluate our translators' performance. We'll also check the quality of a translation job when it's rated low or rejected by a customer.

 

To check the quality of translations, our Language Specialists use GoCheck, a proprietary software tool based on a carefully designed algorithm. This tool allows us to identify and classify errors in a translation and evaluate the overall quality of a translation job, on a scale of 0 to 10.

 

 

Different errors in translation are assigned different weights, depending on how much a particular error type is likely to affect the meaning of the translation or the reader’s comprehension of the text. For example, if a key term is translated incorrectly, this error would have a greater impact on the overall score of the translation, compared to a minor typo or a missed comma.

 

The quality score is also influenced by the length of the text: the same error will have a greater impact if the text is only one paragraph long, compared to a text that spans several pages.

 

We expect our translators to get a minimum score for each different quality level:

 

Standard:	7.0
Advanced:	7.0

 

This score reflects the tolerance for errors at a particular level of translation.

 

For a one-page text, a score of 8.0 may mean that the translation is largely accurate, with perfect spelling, grammar and punctuation, but has one mistranslation (a single word translated inaccurately) or contains a sentence with imperfect structure (that doesn’t sound “quite right”). However, the translation should be largely accurate and generally sound fluent and idiomatic.

 

 

Quality Assurance and Translators

 

Each time a job is reviewed in GoCheck, the translator receives a score and feedback from the Language Specialist, with an overview of errors found. In addition to allowing us to assess translation quality, this process helps provide continued feedback to our translators, enabling them to learn and develop their skills.

 

Every translator has a quality scorecard showing their performance as a Gengo translator. This score reflects how consistent (closer to 10.00) or fluctuating (closer to 0.00) is the quality of the translations that have been reviewed in GoCheck by a Language Specialist.

 

 

 

If a translator is found to consistently perform below our minimum quality standards, we act to revoke their qualification in that language pair and/or level. For example, a translator with an average score of 4.4 (as in the image below) would be far below our quality expectations. When a translator's quality score is lower than 5, their qualifications would get automatically revoked.