Supporting Documentation: Percentage of terminology services that comply with established quality standards

Linguistic service categories

The Translation Bureau offers three categories of linguistic services:

Terminology services:

Translation Bureau terminologists provide a variety of services and advice to the Government of Canada, including:

Conducting terminological research to provide clients with an equivalent for a specialized term in the other official language
Making terminological recommendations on issues requiring in-depth terminology analysis
Creating customized glossaries: preparing or updating specialized glossaries in electronic format
Participating in terminology committees to support the standardization of terminology relevant to a given department or agency
Delivering other terminology projects developed in consultation with clients

Terminologists also produce a variety of quality terminology tools and resources that are available free of charge to Canadians, including:

TERMIUM Plus® (termiumplus.gc.ca) is one of the largest terminology and linguistic data banks in the world, giving access to millions of terms in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. You can find terms, abbreviations, definitions and usage examples in a wide range of specialized fields. The data bank is an essential tool for understanding an acronym, checking an official title, finding an equivalent in another language, and much more.
Other publicly available Glossaries and vocabularies

Data related to the quality of this category of linguistic service can be found in this dataset.

Translation services:

This category relates predominately to translation, revision and editing services as applied to written content. The Translation Bureau offers these services to the Parliament of Canada, as well as federal departments and agencies, in the following languages:

Both official languages (English and French)
Indigenous languages
Foreign languages

The Translation Bureau can also assess the quality of texts that have been previously translated, revised, or written in either English or French, using recognized criteria that ensure the fairness and objectivity of that assessment.

Data related to the quality of this category of linguistic service can be found in the Percentage of translation and interpretation services that comply with established quality standards dataset, where the value in column Service-ENG equals "Translation services" and the value in column Service-FRA is set to "Services de traduction".

Interpretative services:

Interpretative services refer to linguistic services which relate to spoken or visual input. The Translation Bureau offers interpretative services to the Parliament of Canada, and to federal departments and agencies in:

Both official languages (English and French)
Indigenous languages
Foreign languages
American Sign Language (ASL)
Langue des signes Québécoise (LSQ)

Data related to the quality of this category of linguistic service can be found in the Percentage of translation and interpretation services that comply with established quality standards dataset, where the value in column Service-ENG equals "Interpretation" and the value in column Service-FRA is set to "Interprétation".

Departmental Reporting Results (DRR) Calculation

The "Percentage of linguistic services that comply with established quality standards" indicator as reported in PSPC's annual DRR publication combines the percentage of time the Translation Bureau meets their established quality standards in the delivery of the above-mentioned linguistic services. The percentage of time each of the three categories of service achieved their intended quality standard is calculated independently, and then these three quality assessment values are averaged to derive the overall value for all linguistic services delivered in that fiscal year.

Note: Due to the level of effort required to gather and interpret the data used to perform these calculations, this DRR indicator is reported 18 months in arrears. As such, the value reported against the "Percentage of linguistic services that comply with established quality standards" indicator in the 2022 to 2023 Departmental Results Report were based on data from the 2021/2022 fiscal year (as reported in this dataset and the corresponding Percentage of translation and interpretation services that comply with established quality standards dataset).

Terminology service quality assessment

For the records that correspond to a given fiscal year, sum together the count of files (ie: the values in the Num-files_Nb-fiches column) that were assessed to have 2 or less deviations from the intended standard (ie: where the value in the Num-deviations_Nb-écarts column is either 0,1, or 2). Divide this total by the sum of all files assessed for that fiscal year (ie: the sum of all values in the Num-files_Nb-fiches column for this fiscal year.) Multiply this new value by 100 to get the percentage of files that met the intented service quality standard for that fiscal year.

Interpretation service and Translation service quality assessments

The details on how to complete the quality assessments for interpretation services and translation services can be found in the supporting documentation for the corresponding dataset.

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