Certification to ISO 17100 mastered with minimal effort

I believe that certification to ISO 17100 is particularly important for two reasons. On the one hand, because this standard is aimed at translation processes and analyses them more specifically than ISO 9001 does.

On the other hand, this standard has established itself among many companies as a quality seal for professional service providers, and so it is often stipulated as an essential framework condition in invitations to tender, for instance. We also wanted to live up to that requirement.

In the certification, we are required – among other things – to thoroughly review the quality assurance process, because we need standardised specifications both for our internal translators and also for the cooperation with external translators. That applies in particular to the four-eyes principle that we have used at exact! for many years for certain customers. It also entails expanded tasks for other jobs, such as carrying out a revision of the text.

The constant further education of the translators is a quality criterion to which we will pay even more attention in future. We ensure continuous further training for our internal translators, but we have not focused on that in the past with our external translators. We shall work together on that in future.

In actual fact, we only needed minimal preparation. As exact! has already worked with established and sophisticated processes, including translating with the four-eyes principle, for several years, the adjustments were limited almost exclusively to formal aspects like terminology, such as the term “revision” in offers rather than “proofreading”.

However, we set great store in advance on involving the external translators at an early stage, with whom we have nurtured excellent collaborations over several years. We invited them to our office in the spring to discuss various issues, especially the pros and cons and the practical implementation of the standard four-eyes principle.

As before, our customers should continue to expect translations with an extremely high level of quality in the future. We shall now always be providing these translations according to the four-eyes principle. We had not done so in quite the same way in the past.

It has also become evident that we were able to fully comply with the requirements of ISO 17100 from a standing start. That proves to me once again that we are actively putting our quality management into practice and that every employee is playing their part. Our customers expect correct and comprehensible translations — and we shall carry on providing them.