Xbench

First of all, let me tell you that I am a loyal user of Xbench since August 2016 and that I have been religiously paying my subscription every year for the last 8 years (and I will keep doing so!).

So… what is Xbench? In case you didn’t know, Xbench is a quality assurance software that helps you with terminology consistency, spellchecking, punctuation, tags, etc. But the most important feature it has is the Checklist Manager, which allows you to create custom checklists with regular expressions and Word wildcards. And how can this help you? Please, keep reading.

Checklists, the power of Xbench

You can export a bilingual glossary and add it to Xbench, sure, and that may work with some terms. But not with all. Why? Because languages work in many different ways! That’s their magic.

If you tell Xbench that “update” must be translated into Spanish as “actualizar”, Xbench will flag as issues some conjugated forms (such as “actualizaste”, “actualizado”, “actualiza”, etc.) and it won’t flag if the gerund “updating” appears in the source text and “actualizando” (or any other verb form) does not appear in the translation.

But this is just an example, there are lots of nuances that affect every different language. That’s why a full knowledge of the source and target languages is a must in order to create checklists that will really help improve the quality of the translations and avoid false positives as much as possible. Because if you run a QA tool that triggers hundreds of errors, you will probably overlook some important true positives amid all those false positives.

And this can be done with checklists, regular expressions and Word wildcards.

How? By precisely telling Xbench what it should look for. Following the same example above:

  • Xbench should check whether the verb “update” and all its verb tenses appear in the source;
  • and it should also check if the translation is missing any of the possible conjugations of “actualizar”.

You can manually write all the possibilities:

  • The source field is easy: update, updates, updated and updating.
  • But what would you write in the target field? Actualizo, actualizas, actualiza, actualizamos, actualizáis, actualizan. And that’s just the present tense of the indicative. Furthermore, you should also take into account that, with pronouns, that same verb may also need an accent: actualízalo, actualicémoslo. And it will have a “z” or a “c” depending on the vowel that follows: actualiza, actualices. It seems too much work for just a term, doesn’t it?

Yes, it is way too much work. But regular expressions and Word wildcards allow you to write a much simpler instruction that will ensure that all possibilities are covered.

Add Checklist Item screen in Xbench, showing how to add an item that checks if "update" has been translated as "actualizar", with all the possible options.

What can you include in checklists

You won’t probably need to include the verb “update” in a checklist, but you may want to include other important items such as:

  • Specialized terms that applies to your specific industry.
  • Difficult terms that the team is failing to translate properly.
  • Product names.
  • Country names.
  • Slogans and claims.
  • Style Guide specifications:
    • Linguistic preferences.
    • Number formats.
    • Capitalization.
    • Non-breaking spaces.
  • Common mistakes:
    • Source: “up” translated as “down” and vice versa.
    • Target: Plural acronyms ending with an “-s” (acronyms aren’t pluralized in Spanish, they are invariable).

And now what?

Do you want your QA step to be simpler and more effective? Let me help you create checklists that really improve the quality of your translations and simplify the QA phase. You just have to click the button below and send me an email. I will reply as soon as possible so that we can discuss the project specifics. I’ll see you in my inbox!

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