The origins of SAE J2450 Translation Quality Metric can be dated back to Fall, 1997. Its initial name was "J2450 Task Force on a Quality Metric for Language Translation of Service Information". J2450 Translation Quality Metric was developed by Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), a worldwide association of engineers as well as technical experts in the fields such as aerospace, automotive and commercial-vehicle industries, one of whose aims is consensus standards development. With the purpose of establishing a consistent standard against which the quality of translation of automotive service information can be objectively measured regardless of the source language, regardless of the target language, and regardless of how the translation is performed (i.e., human translation or machine translation)”, it was first co-created by General Motors, Ford as well as Chrysler and released in August, 2001, as a recommended practice.
Later, a European SAE-2450-Committee was founded at the end of 2001, which was responsible for the changes and improvement of the draft. Members of this committee are composed of the language staff from the auto companies including Volvo Trucks, Daimler-Chrysler, Audi and Volkswagen as well as other European translation agencies. J2450 became finally an SAE-Norm after the negotiating process between Europe and USA in 2005.
SAE J2450 Translation Quality Metric (2001)'s approach to quality assurance is quite straightforward, which bases quality scores on seven types of errors, i.e. wrong term, syntactic error, omission, word structure or agreement error, misspelling, punctuation error and miscellaneous error. Errors in each category can be classified as either major or minor, with a numeric score attached to each error and severity level (ibid.). The composite score, which decides the translation quality of a text, is the weighted sum of the errors normalized by the number of words in the source text (ibid.). This simple statistical approach makes comparison of the quality figures of different texts easy, while examination of the errors in specific categories can assist in the identification of particular problem areas.
Since its publication, SAE J2450 Translation Quality Metric has become one of the most important measurements in judging the quality of translation in the automobile industry and has been adopted by many translation service providers and car manufacturers. The advantages of SAE J2450 are quite obvious. To begin with, this simple statistical approach makes comparison of the quality figures of different texts easy; secondly, the examination of the errors in specific categories can assist in the identification of particular problem areas; finally, it helps to eliminate post-translation review processes, as already confirmed in the empirical study carried out by Don (2004).