Standards and their Applicability

ISO 9000

ISO 9000 was designed for manufacturing firms and its suitability for service industries is therefore limited. Nonetheless it has proved to be useful. You need to keep in mind that this standard does not define or postulate quality itself but deals with the description and observance of processes. In this case, quality is an indirect derivative of accurate work.

"When I know exactly what I have to do and when, the risk that I'll make a mistake decreases significantly in comparison to when I play it by ear."

This makes sense, of course. In a company where every employee knows exactly what he or she needs to do or not do, the productivity is much higher than in a scenario which allows employees to do whatever they want.

On the other hand, it is possible to document and run a completely meaningless process. You would meet the conditions of the standard, but the results would leave a lot to be desired.

And it is often the small service provider that is expected and required to show a high degree of flexibility. Corseted within such narrow standards, he might not always be compliant. Therefore, a service provider needs to think twice about its process descriptions in order to give themselves some (necessary) leeway.

EN 15038

The "misalignment" of the family of ISO 9000 standards that is quoted above prompted the EU to design a new standard for translation services. If you listen to translators, you will learn that this standard has a bad reputation: It is said to be an excessive, ivory-tower standard with requirements that are impossible to fulfill.

If you don't allow yourself to be deterred by these rumors and if you look at the standard from an unbiased viewpoint, a different picture emerges. In short, the standard delivers a good list of the steps and considerations that are required to perform a thorough and accurate translation job. It does this without the unnecessary addition of exactly defining each individual step and setting it in stone.

The problem is more to do with its absoluteness: A provider is either completely certified or not certified at all. This means that a classic Single Language Vendor, who, for example, offers translations exclusively into German, is well placed to meet the standard.

However, if a provider wants to offer their customers a complete service (in other words, translations into several languages), each new language pairing presents considerable problems when it comes to complying with the standard.

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Caution!

DIN EN 15038 registered
"...translation services in accordance with DIN EN 15038 and are registered with DIN CERTCO ...

Registrations in accordance with EN 15038 are meaningless declarations.

Any company/individual can register without having to face
any consequences!