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LQA: Setup Guide

Set up Linguistic Quality Assurance (LQA) in your Smartling account to measure and track translation quality. This guide walks through creating an LQA schema, enabling LQA on your workflow, and assigning reviewers. Requires an Account Owner role.

New to LQA? Read LQA: Overview first.

Before you begin: LQA Basic or LQA Suite?

This guide covers LQA Basic: adding LQA to a step within your existing production workflow. If you want to run LQA in a separate dedicated project with sampling and round-trip features, see LQA Suite: Overview.

Step 1: Select and publish an LQA schema

An LQA schema defines the error categories and severity levels used to evaluate translations. You need a published schema before you can enable LQA on a workflow step.

Go to Account Settings > Linguistic Quality Assurance to see all schemas in your account. From here you can use an existing schema or create a new one.

Linguists can view LQA schema details while conducting LQA. They cannot modify the schema but can reference the error categories and their descriptions.

Option A: Use an existing schema

If a suitable schema already exists in your account, confirm it is published, then proceed to Step 2.

To view or edit a schema, click the schema name. From here you can view the list of errors, edit or remove errors, and create new categories or errors.

To manage a schema, click the ellipsis next to its name to edit the schema name, disable it, or delete it. Note: only draft schemas can be deleted. Once published, a schema cannot be deleted but can be disabled.

You can have multiple schemas on any workflow, but only one schema per workflow step.

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Option B: Create a new schema

Smartling provides three MQM-compatible schema templates, or you can build a custom schema from scratch. For a full template comparison, see LQA: MQM Schema Templates.

  1. Go to Account Settings > Linguistic Quality Assurance.
  2. Click Create Schema.
  3. Choose to create a custom schema or select one of the following templates:
    • Smartling LQA Schema (Simplified MQM)
    • Smartling LQA Schema (Full MQM)
    • Smartling LQA Schema (MQM with Repeated Error Types)

If you selected a template

  1. Enter a name for your schema.
  2. Edit the weights of each severity level (optional — default values are pre-populated).
  3. Enter a value for Acceptable Penalty Points. By default, this value is set to 20.
  4. Click Confirm. The template's categories and errors are pre-populated. You can proceed to publish the schema, or optionally click the schema name to review and edit it first.

(Optional) When reviewing a template schema, you can configure the following settings per error type:

  • Reviewer is able to change severity level — disable this to prevent reviewers from modifying error severity levels.
  • Reviewer cannot report multiple errors on one translation — when enabled, only one error of this type can be added per translation.
  • Ignore (neutralize) this error type in MQM — when enabled, errors of this type are excluded from the overall MQM score. The LQA Errors & Arbitration report will still display the recorded error severity. Reviewers will not see which error types are neutralized when performing LQA.

If you are creating a custom schema

  1. Enter a schema name.
  2. Choose an error severity format:
    • Numeric — enter severity levels from lowest to highest.
    • Custom — enter a custom severity format and severity levels.
  3. Click Confirm.

Next, add categories to the schema:

  1. Click the schema name to open it.
  2. Click + Create Category.
  3. Enter a category name and description.
  4. Click Save. Continue until all categories are created.

Then add errors to each category:

  1. Click + Create Error.
  2. Choose which category the error applies to (required).
  3. Enter the error name (required).
  4. Enter a description (optional).
  5. Choose a default severity level (optional).
  6. Select whether reviewers can amend the default severity level.
  7. Optionally, enable Reviewer cannot record multiple errors on one translation to restrict this error type to one entry per translation.
  8. Continue until all categories have errors.

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Publish the schema

Once your schema has at least one category and one error, click Publish. The schema will then be available to select on workflow steps.

Published schemas have editing restrictions. You cannot change severity levels, weights, or Acceptable Penalty Points after publishing. To modify these, you will need to create a new schema. You can continue editing schema categories and errors, with two exceptions: the Reviewer cannot record multiple errors on one translation and Ignore (neutralize) this error type in MQM toggles are locked once the schema is published.

Step 2: Add LQA to your workflow

LQA can only be enabled on post-translation workflow steps. If your LQA is carried out by Smartling Language Services, a dedicated LQA step will be added to your workflow automatically. Otherwise, there are a couple of ways to set it up:

Option A: Add a dedicated Quality Evaluation step to an existing workflow

Within your workflow, add a Quality Evaluation step. Using a Quality Evaluation step lets you associate a specific rate for LQA work, as Quality Evaluation is treated as a separate line item within a rate card. Name the step clearly (for example, "LQA Review") so it's easy to distinguish from other steps.

Option B: Enable LQA on any post-translation step

You can also enable LQA directly on an existing post-translation step, including the Published step, so you can perform LQA on completed translations.

To enable LQA on a workflow step (required for both options):

  1. Navigate to your workflow and click on the step where you will be conducting LQA, then click Manage Step.
  2. Under Quality Assurance, select Use this step for Linguistic Quality Assurance and select a schema from the dropdown.
    quality-assurance.png
  3. It is recommended that "Automatically submit edits by users" is turned off so that edits made during LQA evaluation are not automatically submitted to the next step. LQA should also not be set up on a step that can be skipped in a dynamic workflow.
    automatically-submit-edits-setting.png

You can enable LQA on multiple post-translation steps, not just one. Linguists can only access the LQA dialog (including error history and arbitration) on steps they are assigned to that have LQA enabled. If LQA is only on one step, they lose access to that history once content moves forward.

(Optional) Step 3: Add secondary LQA-enabled steps

You can add additional LQA-enabled steps to your workflow for arbitration, rebuttal, or further review. This allows the original translation team to review LQA errors and comments, and dispute them if necessary.

Enable LQA and assign a schema on each additional step following the same process described in Step 2. Linguists can only access the LQA dialog (including error history and arbitration) on steps where they are assigned and where LQA is enabled.

Step 4: Add workflow assignments

Add workflow assignments for the linguists or agency who will be carrying out LQA evaluations. This gives them access to content in the LQA-enabled step and, if content assignment is enabled on that step, allows them to be assigned to specific strings. Once assigned, linguists can evaluate translations in the CAT Tool or in Review mode.

For instructions on adding workflow assignments, see Assign Agencies and Translation Resources to Workflow Steps.

If you work with Smartling Language Services (SLS) as your LQA vendor, workflow assignments will be added and managed by SLS.

Step 5: Authorize content for evaluation

Once your workflow and schema are configured, authorize content into the workflow as you would for any translation job. Strings will flow through to the LQA step when they reach it.

For guidance on how linguists record errors during evaluation, see Evaluating Translations with LQA.

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