ApSIC Xbench: quality control that catches the invisible

ApSIC Xbench is a translation quality-assurance tool from the Barcelona-based company ApSIC — the de facto industry standard for QA, used by professional agencies and localization teams worldwide. At MovaPro, no large project ships to a client without an Xbench pass: it is a fixed step of our process, right alongside the human editor.

What Xbench does

Xbench takes a bilingual file (source + translation) from any of our CAT systems — Trados, memoQ, Phrase, or XTM — and combs through it in minutes against dozens of formal rules:

• Consistency. Identical source sentences translated differently — and different sentences that accidentally received the same translation.
• Numbers and units. Every digit in the translation is checked against the source: dates, amounts, document numbers, technical parameters.
• Completeness. Untranslated and empty segments, source text accidentally left in place.
• Terminology. Deviations from the approved project glossary — a term the translator “renamed” against the database.
• Technical details. Double spaces, broken tags, stray punctuation, formatting issues.

Why it matters to you

The human eye misses things — that’s normal. On a project with thousands of segments, even the best editor cannot remember that the line “Remove the filter cover” on page 14 was translated differently than on page 480. Xbench checks everything against everything — that is how we kept terminology consistent across a three-year, 5,000+-drawing project.

Numbers without surprises. In legal translation an error in a case number — or in medical translation an error in a dosage — costs far too much. A formal number check is the cheapest insurance against the most expensive mistakes.

A complement to people, not a replacement. Xbench does not judge style or meaning — that is the translator’s and editor’s job. But by taking the mechanical cross-checking off their hands, it lets humans focus on what only humans can do.

How Xbench fits our process

1. Translation — a specialist linguist works in a CAT system with translation memory and a glossary.
2. Editing — a separate editor proofreads the text end to end.
3. Xbench pass — the bilingual file runs through the full check set; every hit is reviewed manually (some “errors” are deliberate choices, and a human confirms them).
4. Fixes and re-check — corrections go into the CAT system, and the final file passes control once more.

Every project works this way — from a set of personal documents to multi-volume technical documentation. Send your files for a quote and see the result for yourself.