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What Does Error Rate Mean?

Project error rate is a useful metric that project managers can use to evaluate the performance of translators assigned to a Project. Error rate is an indicator of overall translation quality for a Project or document. Lilt considers an error rate over 5% to be a serious indicator that a document should be unlocked and have its whole contents reviewed.

A Project’s error rate is displayed as a value between 0% and 100%, signifying the rate of translation errors across the Project’s documents. More precisely, error rate is the percent of segments reviewers have marked as having errors out of the total number of segments reviewed.

Note that if Review Sampling is on, the number of segments reviewed is less than the total number of segments in a Project. As an example, if 10 segments were reviewed and the reviewer marked 4 segments as having translation errors, there would be a 40% error rate.

The following error categories contribute to error rate:

  • Language Adequacy: punctuation, typos, and spelling errors
  • Text Spec: client or industry approved terminology
  • Mistranslation: translation is not accurate or source text is mistranslated
  • Readability: target text has an awkward word or sentence structure
  • Technical: incorrect tag placement, broken variables, missing spaces, or broken web links

The following error categories do not contribute to error rate:

  • Source: indicates an error in the original source segment
  • Not an error: stylistic update or omissions/additions that do not affect meaning
  • Repeated Error: a repeated instance of an error that has already been flagged and categorized in the Project

Viewing Project error rate

The error rate for a Project displays the collective error rate for documents that are fully reviewed. Project error rate is displayed in two places: project reports and revision reports.

Project report

The Project error rate can be found in the Project Report tab after generating or updating the report. If the Project doesn't have any documents that have been fully reviewed, the error rate will not display at all.

Revision report

If the review of documents has not yet been completed, but you would like to see the percent of reviewed segments that have been marked with errors, you can generate a Revision Report on the Project page by clicking on Deliver and then clicking Revision Report.

This will download an XLSX spreadsheet file with a detailed report about the number of segments reviewed and the number of segments marked as having errors.

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