Quality Control (FQA, Formatting Quality Assurance)

The expert team of qualified Quality Control (FQA, Format Quality Assurance) professionals is an important part of our success. They check all our translated, updated and edited documents for formatting errors, layout distortions, and inconsistencies. This procedure is also known as a "Final Eye" check. It is much more important than many people think. Because all careful and painstaking work of translators, editors and proofreaders can be ruined by a simple typo, missing symbol or incorrect line break in the middle of a large heading on the front page of a technical, medical or law document.

Most of these obvious mistakes happen due to the usage of Computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools (such as Trados, Déjà Vu, memoQ, Wordfast, etc.) or other content management software. The reason for that is quite simple: multiple automatic conversions of the source document. Often even initial formatting of the source document is far from the ideal. The resulting soup of formatting tags is difficult to edit and understand. Sometimes it is easier to pre-format documents before importing them into content processing software or copy the content into the neatly formatted template. But this is another story. Please contact us if you need a complete solution: we offer QC, pre- and post- formatting services in concert.

The typical errors we catch in the translated and other types of automatically processed documents:

• The text is missing or cut-off
• Spoiled tables formatting (for example, table rows breaking between pages)
• Incorrect or mixed font types and sizes, irregular characters spacing, corrupted characters
• Incorrect line breaks in the middle of the paragraph the company, product, or personal names, titles, phone numbers, dates, and addresses
• Footnotes moved to the wrong page
• Incorrect dates, numbers and measurements localization (for example, periods instead of commas or vice versa).

Please consider other LinguaFranca services you might need, including Multilingual Desktop Publishing, and Translation. Also, you can take a look at our impressive Our Experience section with a brief overview of our recent and ongoing projects.