exact! scores three certifications

Boooring – this is often the reaction when people start talking about standardisation. exact! happens to be committed to three standards. But why should a small translation provider like exact! go to all that trouble?

The journey began exactly nine years ago when exact! decided to pursue a certification in accordance with the standard ISO 9001 on requirements for quality management. Quality management entails carefully planning and strategically implementing a company’s policies and goals. The key here is to steer company processes in a targeted manner and continually improve them. The essential preconditions for this are a strong customer orientation as well as an efficient organisational structure (organisation chart) and operation structure (process landscape). Following our initial certification according to ISO 9001:2008 in July 2013, we were recertified in July 2016 in line with the completely revised standard ISO 9001:2015. While the revised standard contained more flexible documentation rules, it also brought entirely new requirements in areas such as risk and opportunity assessment. As each certificate is valid for three years with annual surveillance audits, exact! has been successfully recertified in 2019 and most recently in July 2022 following inspections by an independent external auditor.

exact! is proud to demonstrate its proven process landscape by applying ISO 9001 on a daily basis. In December 2017, exact! went a step further to receive certification according to the ISO 17100 standard on requirements for translation services, which defines the general process workflow of a translation order and divides it into sub-processes. This standard is specifically tailored to translation service providers. The certification guarantees that everyone at exact! implements our projects according to processes that are standardised and transparent for our customers.

As part of the external audit for ISO 17100 certification, companies have the opportunity to additionally pursue certification according to the ISO 18587 standard on requirements for post-editing machine translations. Because the team at exact! had already gained extensive post-editing experience and begun offering the service to customers, it made perfect sense to add the corresponding standard to our repertoire. Having received this third certificate in December 2021, exact! is now ideally equipped for the changing requirements within the translation industry. One thing is for sure: despite its great potential, machine translation is no replacement for a human translator.

We operate according to translation standards at exact! and use them to demonstrate our expertise to potential customers. Anyone can claim to be good. But excellence confirmed by an external auditor is far more convincing. We hope to reinforce our customers’ faith in our abilities with these certifications.

Due to the requirements from the standards that exact! has committed to meeting, we guarantee the following:

• Orders for translation and the other services we offer (revision, transcreation, terminology, post-editing, etc.) are always completed by experienced, professional translators with relevant qualifications.
• Both our project managers and translators follow our jointly developed and documented processes, ensuring that no steps are forgotten. The procedure is thus clear and transparent, and everyone stays on the same page.
• The quality of our translations and other services is no coincidence, but can be planned and repeated.

It must be noted that processes are always certified rather than individual products or services. exact! therefore creates the conditions and provides the resources needed to meet our customers’ expectations.

Fulfilling the requirements of three standards is no small feat, and it certainly gives us plenty to do. It’s only possible by constantly re-evaluating familiar tasks and processes in order to continually optimise them. We at exact! are always asking ourselves how we can ensure that the needs of our customers are met in the best way possible. After all, we’d like our customers to not only return, but also recommend us to their business partners.

Check out our other blog articles on this topic:

• exact! is successfully certified in accordance with ISO 18587
• Active quality management at exact!
• Certification to ISO 17100 mastered with minimal effort