Drum roll please; let’s hear it for Untranslate because we have something to celebrate. At the beginning of May, Untranslate comprehensively passed a double audit and were awarded ISO certification for post-editing machine translation from KIWA, a Dutch accredited certification body.

The translation profession is not regulated, which basically means anyone can offer their services as a translation agency. But as a customer, how can you gauge the quality of the work you receive? A good indication is if the translation agency is underwritten by ISO 17100, a certificate that can only be awarded if the agency can prove it only works with professional translators who translate into their native language and who have the necessary knowledge, experience and background. In addition, the translations must go through the correct checks afterwards, the project managers must work according to specific procedures, and all project information must be logged. Untranslate was awarded the ISO 17100 certification in 2016, and convinced the certification body, KIWA, that they had retained the required qualities again this year.

But Untranslate offers more than “traditional” translation, they also offer machine translation with post-editing. We therefore thought that this was the perfect moment for Untranslate to apply for ISO standard 18587, the quality label for post-editing of machine translation. With this quality label we guarantee, among other things, that the optimal (post) production process has been applied within an integrated translation infrastructure and that the post editors have the right competencies to achieve a qualitative result.

In the production process, being able to understand the translation is paramount, as is consistency and correctness of the information displayed. Standard language and the correct formatting must be used for this, but the stylistic and terminological agreements made with the client must also be followed closely. The post-editor takes the source text as an absolute reference to check whether adjustments are needed and to implement them if necessary. By editing the machine translation output, or providing his/her own translation, a complete translation is achieved. It is important that the post-editor is a professional translator with knowledge of CAT tools and machine translation. There are many different competencies expected of him/her: linguistic and textual translation competence with the source/target languages; research skills; cultural, technical and domain-specific knowledge. Quality can only be guaranteed by working with people with the right profiles. After they have completed their work, the post-production process takes place, during which proofreaders verify the quality of the translation and use the feedback from the entire process to improve the MT output in the future. The big advantage of this approach is speed, which reduces production costs.

Read the press release issued by KIWA here (only in Dutch).