The translation industry provides specific, often invisible, but absolutely crucial services for companies, small and large, to be able to successfully sell into foreign markets.
The Association of Translation Companies (ATC) has been representing the interests of translation companies across the world for over 40 years, and offer a raft of services to their members, the latest of which is an industry specific ISO Certification Service.
Many translation and language service providers are small to medium enterprises who utilise a range of external suppliers to meet their customer needs.
With an ever-increasing need for organisations to meet requirements for multi-lingual products and services, there is a strong demand. And the need for confidence in the quality of translation services is high, with the implications of poorly translated material having potential for severe damage to business and reputation.
This means that translation companies and language services providers have a keen interest in demonstrating to their clients that their service meets the highest standards, and what better way to do that than through attaining certification to the raft of industry specific ISO Standards…
However, many language service providers have struggled with achieving certification to the ISO Standards because the industry specific standards either aren’t available through many of the larger Certification Bodies, or come at such a hefty ‘bespoke’ price that it is out of reach of the smaller businesses. Even for ISO 9001, ATC members often found that they were being visited by auditors with little or no understanding of their markets or offerings, which made the audits painful and of limited value.
ATC heard these concerns and has stepped in to fill the void, offering their members the opportunity to achieve Certification to ISO 9001, 17100 and 18587 through their own service, ATC Certification.
ATC auditors will have industry specific knowledge so that customers can gain maximum value from their time on site, with the added benefit of the highly regarded ATC brand to support confidence in the standards of excellence and improvement achieved.
In the words of Raisa McNab, ATC’s lead on standards “having ISO standards enables translation companies to put a stamp of quality into our operations, which enables clients to trust us with their important messages”.
- Samantha Somerville (of Jigsaw Quality Consultancy)
