What is Linguistic Testing?
Linguistic testing is part of the quality assurance (QA) process, which verifies that all translated content is done so accurately and effectively for the target audience. Typically, linguistic testing is needed for complex project translations like websites, apps, and even certain medical devices. This is a critical step in ensuring that the project not only looks the way it should, but also so that the message resonates with the user. In addition, particularly for software applications in medical devices, inaccurate translation due to lack of linguistic testing can create confusion for the target audience, potentially endangering patients’ lives. Without proper linguistic testing, time and money can be wasted after the project is finished to these fix mistakes and errors that otherwise could have been avoided.
While linguistic testing ensures the completeness of the translation, including verifying spelling, grammar, punctuation, style, and consistency, it also helps support the proper use of key terms that are industry or culturally specific. For life science companies, this is critically important as an industry that heavily relies on initialisms, both internally as well as externally.
CSOFT Health Sciences ensures the highest-quality translations through our extensive quality assurance and linguistic testing process. Utilizing our in-country linguists with a minimum of 7 years of experience, combined with our subject matter expert network, we are able to virtually transcreate all content into over 250 languages.
Linguistic Testing for Software
One of the most important uses for linguistic testing in the translation process is translating software UI. For life science companies’ websites and apps, incorrect translation can not only cause a bad experience for the user, resulting in potential loss of sales or worse, lives, but also create issues in branding continuity.
Through our 20+ years of experience, CSOFT Health Sciences has developed our localization best practices for quality assurance with linguistic testing to ensure that companies can be confident in their brand when expanding into global markets. To ensure that each UI string is accurately and effectively translated, CSOFT Health Sciences’ in-country linguistic testing experts make sure to:
- Check that all UI strings have been translated (both hardcoded and external resource strings)
- Check that all concatenations are properly resolved
- Check that there is terminological and stylistic consistency between menu items and dialog box titles
- Check that accented characters display and print properly
- Check that punctuation rules are observed
- Check that hyphenation is correct, and that alphabetical/numerical sorting rules are observed
- Check that keyboard shortcuts are consistent with the target operating system
- Check that abbreviations have been used when required by interface design
Quality Assurance
CSOFT Health Sciences has developed a process for quality assurance to ensure that every medical translation project meets quality standards in a cost-effective and timely manner. We are certified in ISO 17100:2015, ISO 9001:2015, and ISO 13485:2016 to ensure our customized solutions meet global regulatory requirements. Our subject matter expert linguists have at least seven years of experience and work with in-country reviewers and project style guides to meet industry standards. CSOFT offers an online translation management ecosystem for one central location to leverage real-time translation memory and terminology management through our innovative cloud-based technology. Every step of the way, CSOFT has you covered.
Learn more about our quality assurance process.
Data Security
With over 20 years of experience in medical translation, CSOFT Health Sciences understands the importance of data security to our clients, and we take nothing for granted when confidentiality is a concern. Our well-documented and fully traceable information data security policies, checklists, and quality records leverage the best practices of ISO 27001. They are designed to protect everything from source data to translations. From our 24/7/365 data monitoring and advanced encryption to our access control measures, you can be sure that your project data is safe from start to finish.
Learn more about how CSOFT prioritizes data security.