Quality assurance in multilingual legal databases

Abstract

In addition to several other factors, terminology and terminology management are perceived to be important elements of the quality assurance (QA) system of document production, translation, and multilingual lawmaking. This implies that quality in translation, including legal translation, partly depends on the quality of terminology found in terminological databases (TDBs). In order to use terminology as a QA tool, the quality of TDBs has to be ensured. In this paper, we discuss the relevance of legal TDBs for translation quality and propose a QA framework for multilingual legal TDBs based on a comprehensive approach, which includes QA at workflow level, at product level, and at staff level. For each of this three aspects we address the main features to be implemented — and how they should be implemented — to successfully achieve and maintain high quality of multilingual legal TDBs. Our comprehensive approach to QA therefore considers persons, processes, products and services as well as dedicated tools.