The 7-point checklist we use before launching bilingual copy

Machine translation shows. Not always, not catastrophically — but to a native speaker it shows the way a lopsided picture frame shows: the room still works, something is off, and once you see it you cannot unsee it on that page again. Bilingual QA at Qvicom is a lightweight, repeatable pass — seven checks, about twenty minutes per public page — and it is the reason our Spanish pages read like they were written by someone who works here, because they were.

1. Human pass against the glossary

First we read. Ten recurring terms are agreed once per project (quote vs cotización, invoice vs factura, care plan vs plan de cuidado…) and every page is checked against that list. The glossary is the cheapest quality device in the whole process: most "translation errors" are actually unmade decisions.

2. Structure parity

Both languages must have the same skeleton: identical sections in the same order, same forms with same fields, same CTAs. We count headings and list items across locales. The most common machine-translation failure is not wrong words — it is the Spanish page quietly missing a section that existed in English.

3. The invisible layer

Title, meta description, Open Graph text, hreflang/canonical pair, form validation messages, empty states, emails (welcome, quote, invoice, reminder, reset). If a string can reach a user, it is bilingual or it is a bug.

4. Formats and conventions

Dates (10/04 vs 04/10 — a real ambiguity, checked every time), currency presentation (US$ vs $ vs COP naming), thousands separators, phone formats per market, address order. Nothing here is glamorous; everything here is visible when wrong.

5. Names, entities and facts

People, company names, city names, plan names, legal entity names — identical where they must be identical, deliberately different where the markets use different names. Numbers in the copy (response times, allowances, prices) are checked against the source of truth, not against the last draft.

6. Legal and compliance wording

Privacy, cookies, terms, refund language: reviewed as sentences with consequences, not as translatable filler. Colombian (Ley 1581) and U.S. expectations do not mirror each other; the page states what the studio actually does — no invented certifications, no promised guarantees.

7. The live spot check, after publish

We open the published page in both locales and click it like a stranger: switch language from the menu, submit the form, read the confirmation in the same language you started in, check the shares (social card) once. The QA is not finished when the CMS says "published"; it is finished when both versions behave.

What this buys you

Twenty minutes a page buys parity that search engines can verify (hreflang actually matching), trust that visitors can feel, and a maintenance story that survives the next person who edits the content. The glossary and the checklist ship with the handover — they are part of what you own on delivery day.