TLC's Language Blog

Not every translation carries the same risk. Learn how a risk-based translation approach helps organizations match quality controls to the potential consequences of multilingual communication errors.

How do we know the translation is accurate, and how do we prove it? That is exactly the kind of question a compliance-minded organization should be asking.

Regulated organizations are already being held to the defensibility standard. Whether they know it yet often depends on whether something has gone wrong. The question is not whether defensibility will eventually be required. It is whether the system was built to provide it before it is needed.

Clients in regulated industries should ask their Language Services Providers to make the translation process visible. Otherwise, they can assume the worst: that controls, sources, approvals, and decisions behind the words are undocumented or unverifiable. That Google Translate was used, instead of a qualified human translator working in a secure environment.