Elhuyar Fundazioa - Language Services 

What is language quality? 

When describing or defining the excellence or quality of a language service, two aspects of quality emerge which are the "technical" and "functional aspects.

• In the sphere of language services, technical quality means that the language is of high quality.
• Functional quality is also crucial. This means that language quality alone is not enough in order to satisfy the customer. The service as a whole has to be taken into account, and for this reason other factors close to it are also important.

In order to somehow parameterize quality of service, there are two indicators that enable it to be broken down and, if possible, measured:

• In our case, the technical quality of the service and language quality amount to the same thing.
• On the other hand, there are many indicators of functional quality: price, keeping to deadlines, the customer’s formats (paper, electronic document, website, oral text), after sales service, etc.

An overall perspective when defining language quality is of course necessary, but we should not forget that in an organisation that offers language services, the customer’s perspective is also an integral part of language quality, in other words, the customer can request that his or her language criteria be met, and these criteria may change between one customer and another.