Translation Quality Assurance – Definition

The set of checkpoints — contextual review, source-link tracking, local sign-off, versioning — that catch translation errors before they go live.

Translation QA works best when translators review copy in a live preview rather than isolated text fragments, and when a changed source text automatically flags its translations as outdated. Local market sign-off catches nuance a pure linguistic review misses. A frequently overlooked QA gap is context loss during translation handoff: a translator working from an exported spreadsheet of isolated strings has no visibility into where each string appears or how much visual space is available, which routinely produces grammatically correct translations that don't fit their container or read oddly out of context. QA processes that keep translators working within the actual page structure catch a category of error that pure linguistic proofreading systematically misses.