Why ISO certification?

DIN EN ISO 17100:2016 (“ISO 17100”) is an international quality standard for the translation industry. It “includes provisions [...] concerning the management of core proc­esses, minimum quality requirements, the avail­ability and management of resources, and other actions necessary for the delivery of a quality translation ser­vice.” In addition to the actual translation and revision, the standard addresses prepa­ration and feedback processes, security issues, and technical capabilities.

The standard sets out specific qualification and compe­tence requirements for translators and revisers (which is what the standard calle reviewers). We, and all the translators we work with, meet these requirements: a recognized university degree in translation or equivalent in another field with two years (full-time equivalent) of documented expe­rience as a translator, or at least five years (full-time equivalent of documented, professional experience as a translator. Most of us have been work­ing in our field for several decades—and we keep our knowledge up to date.

This website probably demonstrates what we do, how we work, and who we are, as well as our past perfor­mance and experience better than any audit could. It shows you that that we have the required dental and medical exper­tise in our language combinations that we have been providing to our clients for 35 years now.

In many cases our clients will request a “basic” trans­lation without any standard-related overhead or value-added services (“basic” refers a level of process perfor­mance, not, of course, to the accuracy and appro­priate­ness of a translation or its suitability for its purpose, which must never be compromised). They use the results as part of or in the context of their own down­stream process chains.

However, some of our corporate clients are themselves certified according to a specific quality standard and therefore request the value-added services defined by ISO 17100, either individually or as part as an complete ISO 17100-compliant package:

• Production of a translation by two people — one in the role of translator and one in the role of reviser — who have the same high level of quali­fication.
• Full documentation of every step of the process to demonstrate compliance with the standard for internal quality processes or audits.

This requires additional resources and additional time and effort in terms of performance and project coor­dination. If a project is to be completed in full com­pliance with ISO 17100, this should best be communi­cated and explicitly agreed at the RFP stage.