According to standardization bodies, an overall quality management program is comprised of these activities: planning, assurance, control, evaluation, and improvement. These activities span the checks carried out on individual projects to ensure process deliverables meet specifications and the monitoring and tracking that takes place across projects to address recurring issues. The first half of the course will focus on quality management from the perspective of the LSPs (Localization Service Providers) and will consider quality in terms of the details of individual language pairs, processes, and multilingual productions. Topics will include the evolution of the strategies being developed in the language industry in response to ongoing developments in AI and machine translation, which continue to blur the boundaries around what has typically constituted quality. The first part of the course will also research the big-picture structures, best practices, and quality models relevant to the design of quality management systems. Those systems, when managed well, support the ultimate quality objective: consistently meeting stakeholder requirements across all projects - no matter the language pair, process, or content type.

The second half of the course examines quality management from the buyer’s point of view. It will explain how quality management systems are built in corporations that buy localization services and how quality is approached not just as a linguistic but as a business function, which translates into specific quality management models, review types, review approaches, metrics collection and management, automation and budget management. The second half of the course will examine the interdependence of quality management with other corporate and localization functions, and teach students how to evangelize quality management to other corporate teams, collaborate with them on quality improvement programs or get buy-in for stakeholder collaboration.