The Challenge of Quality

Achieving, measuring and maintaining quality across projects

Translation, as an industry service, occupies a distinctive niche, balancing the inherent creativity involved in transferring information from one language into another, with the need for industrialized production processes.
This duality inevitably leads to a situation where each project is unique, with an inherent expectation that not everything will always proceed as planned.

Linguistic nuances more often than expected, can have multiple valid interpretations. This leads to differing but equally justifiable editorial choices. This subjectivity creates situations where the answer to the question of quality remains an approximation. Uncertainty will always remain.

Keep scrolling to learn how we solve this problem.

Our solution: A Holistic Approach

Total Quality Management and Standard Operating Procedures

Our leadership’s unique combination of educational backgrounds in fine arts & design and business engineering has enabled us to develop a precise yet dynamic set of SOPs that combines the best of both worlds:

Our engineering perspective provides the framework and desire for precision, while our artistic angle has infused our approach to SOPs with a mindset that recognizes deviations and failures as a chance to develop new solutions.

Enabled by a practice of open and direct communication as well as a module based Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), we employ a holistic yet quantifiable approach to Total Quality Management (TQM). To us, “Total” means that all areas of our operations work together to aim at producing zero defects. This process starts with the selection of team members, promoting only the best, training all linguist based on our review findings and using optimized workflows for each type of text.

This assertion is based on the idea that concrete, data-driven insights from our SOPs can improve the quality of discussions and subsequently the quality of the cooperation and its results. Accurate metrics further help us predict quality, identify trends and highlight areas needing improvement, before their effects unfold. By establishing “open to all digital communication hubs” within which we transparently share these metrics and stimulate a culture of open communication between all stakeholders, we are committing to a client-centric and ethical practice.

The benefits for our Clients

For all our services, we adopt a client-centric ethical practice focused on open access to information and transparent communication, bringing substantial benefits to our clients in terms of quality, quantity, and cost-effectiveness.

Costs

By providing complete access to information about our processes, we empower clients to make informed, cost-effective decisions. This transparency in cost structuring on the one hand ensures that our clients pay a fair price, aiding in effective budget planning while on the other hand assures that our linguists are compensated equally as fair.

Quality

Our transparent approach ensures clients are well-informed about processes and their complexities, leading to realistic expectations and higher satisfaction with the final product. Our collaborative environment, where client feedback is integral, is designed to facilitate continuous improvements to processes and subsequently the quality of our services. While one would expect above-mentioned fair compensation of linguists to be a given, it unfortunately is not, which contributes to structural quality issues throughout our industry.

Quantity

The before-mentioned benefits to quality and cost are not only immensely valuable in themselves, but also allow us to offer our clients more flexible scaling of volumes.

Our approach in a nutshell

Enabled by module based Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), we employ a holistic approach to Total Quality Management (TQM). At the center of any given production process is the Translation Workflow Module. A framework based on the LangOps manifesto, that helps us design a highly integrated and automated yet human-centric production process.

Philosophy

At SemiotiCom we believe that the age of AI, while inevitable, does not mean that human intelligence will become obsolete.

Human adaptation of AI-generated content and the maintenance and constant development of AI models remains indispensable.

LangOps

While the LangOps manifesto consists of 12 points, at SemiotiCom we mainly embrace the following 5 ideas:

Understand all customers
Embrace data-centric AI
Try AI first
Assess quality of AI
Expect transparency, control and scalability
Leverage available data and tech

Total Quality Management

A term most commonly used in the context of ISO 9001 compliant processes is a systemic approach to quality that has a strong focus on:

Client and vendor satisfaction & feedback
Process Frameworks (SOPs)
Documentation
Evidence-Based Decision Making
Risk Management
Continuous Improvement

Standard Operating Procedures

Long before the official launch of SemiotiCom, in March of 2024, we have started documenting our experience and destilled it into a system of SOPs, that describes even the smallest of processes.

Over the years we have created a library of SOPs containing multiple versions of the same process. These processes reflect the multitude of regulatory and tech restrictions our diverse clientele has challanged us with.

Support & Services you can count on

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