Translations and localisation

EN15038... source wikipedia.org

EN15038 is a quality standard developed especially for translation services providers. The EN15038 standard ensures the consistent quality of the service. It requires regular audits by the certification body, and if any discrepancy is found, the certification shall be revoked.

Many European translation companies have long felt the need for a reliable method of demonstrating the quality of the services they provide to their customers. Many sought ISO 9001 certification as a demonstration of their commitment to quality management systems. However, as the ISO 9001 standard does not address the sort of translation-specific processes which many translators consider important in determining quality outcomes, this standard did not become widely accepted as a "guarantee of quality" in the industry. In 2006, a quality standard, specifically written for the translation industry, EN 15038, was published by CEN, the European Committee for Standardization. This was a serious attempt to provide certification of translation-specific quality management using independent, on-site audits by recognized certification bodies. This standard is gaining acceptance worldwide and the European Union has begun including it as a benchmark in its tender specifications.

CAT... source wikipedia.org

Computer-assisted translation, computer-aided translation or CAT is a form of language translation in which a human translator uses computer software to support and facilitate the translation process.

Computer-assisted translation is sometimes called machine-assisted, or machine-aided, translation (not to be confused with machine translation).

The automatic machine translation systems available today are not able to produce high-quality translations unaided: their output must be edited by a human to correct errors and improve the quality of translation. Computer-assisted translation (CAT) incorporates that manual editing stage into the software, making translation an interactive process between human and computer.

Some advanced computer-assisted translation solutions include controlled machine translation (MT). Higher priced MT modules generally provide a more complex set of tools available to the translator, which may include terminology management features and various other linguistic tools and utilities. Carefully customized user dictionaries based on correct terminology significantly improve the accuracy of MT, and as a result, aim at increasing the efficiency of the entire translation process

File format... source wikipedia.org

A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free and may be either unpublished or open.

Some file formats are designed for very particular types of data: PNG files, for example, store bitmapped images using lossless data compression. Other file formats, however, are designed for storage of several different types of data: the Ogg format can act as a container for different types of multimedia, including any combination of audio and video, with or without text (such as subtitles), and metadata. A text file can contain any stream of characters, including possible control characters, and is encoded in one of various character encoding schemes. Some file formats, such as HTML, scalable vector graphics, and the source code of computer software are text files with defined syntaxes that allow them to be used for specific purposes.