ISO 17100:2015 defines a set of best practises for managing translation services. Adhering to these best practises helps design a smoothly run translation process that delivers a quality translation.

ISO published this standard on 1 May 2015 as the first international standard for translation service requirements. While it is not the only set of best practise for translation out there it is definitely the most important one. This blog post will give you a short introduction to ISO 17100, explain some of the main requirement and show why it is important.

ISO 17100 was based on the previous European standard EN 15038:2006. This standard was developed within CEN and was published in May 2006. Since ISO now has a very robust subcommittee (TC37/SC5) that deals with all translation, interpreting and related technology issues it was deemed the best host for a new international translation standard.

In spite of the fact that ISO 17100 was based on EN 15038 it is a completely reworked and updated standard and it went through the complete standardization process at ISO. The result is, I believe, a very good standard which servers well translation service providers (TSPs), buyers of translation and the community.

There are several requirements which the TSP must adhere to in order to meet the requirements of ISO 17100. The TSP needs to acquire qualified and competent human resources and proper technical resources, and design process workflows which meets the requirements of the standard. The standard also states that the TSP is fully responsible for the entire translation project.

Human resources are very important to the standard. There must be a documented HR process in place. The standard sets out specific qualifications and competences for the various people involved in a translation project such as translators, revisers and project managers. However, it is not enough for the translation company to check that people have these competences but they must also be keep on record and updated regularly.

ISO 17100 states that there must be a written agreement between the client and the translation service provider. If the client and the translation company come to this agreement over the phone or email, the translation company is expected to write up the agreement and send it to the client as confirmation of what has been agreed. The standard also makes sure that the client knows beforehand what the translation project will cost because they receive a quote from the TSP.

Communication is essential to this standard. ISO 17100 states that queries in both directions must be dealt with effectively and the same applies to feedback which has to be relayed to all the individual involved in the project. It also specifies that there must be a process for communicating any information relating to linguistic specifications.

In all cases the workflow for an ISO 17100 translation project shall involve translation as well as full revision of the target text. Both the translator and the reviser shall have the same high qualifications and competences. This ensures that the principle of two pair of eyes is applied in the translation process and this is very important in ensuring quality. The project must also be managed by competent project manager who can demonstrate their qualifications.

These requirements jointly ensure that a translation performed according to ISO 17100 should be a quality translation. The standard also ensures that buyers of translation can be reasonably confident that they are working with a professional translation company who is using industry best practises to provide high quality translation service. More information on implementing ISO 17100 is available here.

Two members of the audience were unimpressed with Mark Childress’ lecture at TM-Europe. When he started speaking both looked up and showed a mild interest in this tall American with a deep voice who regularly quotes someone called Yogi Berra, allegedly a baseball philosopher. However, when Mark started talking our two unimpressed audience members seemed to take the view that terminology was worthy but dull and settled down to have a snooze. These two members of the audience were dogs. The people in the audience heard an excellent lecture on terminology. Kevin Lossner, who owns these two dogs will probably protest that they were in fact incredibly interested in everything that went on at TM-Europe 2012, but we know he’s lying.

Mark was the keynote speaker who opened TM-Europe 2012. The conference theme was The Future of Translation and we wanted to make a point by having a presentation on terminology open the conference. Mark gave a lecture and a very interesting lecture it was too. He brought up major issues with how terminology is used with real examples. He discussed how terminology can bewilder as well as inform. He also gave examples where using the terminology which is commonly understood rather than the terminology of the experts can save lives.

There is a lot of discussion at other conferences and on social and other media about the future of translation. Some commentators paint a future of automated, commoditized, lower quality translation. The people who are suggesting this is the future look like they know what they are talking about. This future of large LSPs brokering translation and machine translation vendors automating all in sight looks impressive. To paraphrase a wonderful line from Raymond Chandler: From thirty feet away they look like a lot of class. From ten feet away they look like they were meant to be seen from thirty feet away.

At TM-Europe we were discussing a different future. It was a future where words matter, language matters and there is absolutely nothing wrong with aiming for excellence. The second keynote speaker, Chris Durban made a very strong case for this pursuit of excellence and the premium market. Chris is an international business woman, a business analyst, a marketing expert, an entrepreneur and she has the words ‘Freelance Translator’ written on her business card. Her presentation received a lot of attention on twitter and in other blogs. Chris’ message is about being focused, being specialized and aiming for the premium market. She showed how she helped her clients to realize the importance of translation. Her stories of winning business always seemed to start with respect for the client and an understanding of their issues. She mentioned signing your work as way of taking responsibility for quality.

Stefan Gentz gave an excellent presentation on Change Management. He illustrated how we all have slightly different perspectives by asking everyone to stand up close their eyes and point north. As you can imagine not everyone was pointing in the same direction.

Reinhard Schaler took one particular aspect of the future, Social Localisation as the topic for his presentation. It is often the case when Reinhard gets up to speak he uses a video or music clip to illustrate his point. This time he used Randy Newman’s song Political Science (No one likes us – I don’t know why!) to illustrate the ‘Why don’t they just speak English’ attitude of some developers. Reinhard’s account of TM-Europe is available here: http://reinhardschaler.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/no-one-likes-us-i-dont-know-why-tm-europe-warsaw-3-4-october-2012/

Alain Chamsi, CEO, JiveFusion Technologies, Martin Beuster of Context and Doug Strock of Global Language Translations and Consulting gave excellent presentations on process and project management. The Technology Showcase had presentations from Paul Filkin of SDL, Gábor Ugray of Kilgray and Bastian Enners of Plunet. This was followed by an overview of research in NLP and other technologies from Dr. Maciej Ogrodniczuk of the Polish Academy of Science and Piotr Pęzik, of the University of Łódź.

Kevin Lossner, the owner of the dogs mentioned above, said somewhere his presentation was a rant. I am not sure of this but it certainly was a lively heart full opinion on a range of subjects. He wrote about it on his blog: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2012/10/the-buck-stops-where.html. Kevin spoke together with Doug Strock and Michal Tyszkowski of Centrum Lokalizacji C&M on a panel dealing with machine translation. The title of this presentation asked whether MT was hype. The discussion here had little hype and those using MT had a very realistic view of how it can be used. Michal compared it to packet soup. He pointed this was widely used a base ingredient for other things and rarely used on its own. Michal claimed the same was true of MT.

We had hoped that the translator, Miguel Llorens would join us for the MT panel and for The Warsaw Pact Debate. Sadly he died a few weeks before the conference. We used a presentation made up of twitter and blog quotes from Miguel as a background for the MT debate. As I got to decide which quotes to use I was able to include one of my favourite tweets from him which had absolutely nothing to do with the subject being discussed: The main question archaeologists of the future will have about our civilization: "Why did they have so many goddamned headphones?"

You can download the full presentation of Miguel quotes here: http://www.tm-europe.org/sites/default/files/Miguel-quotes.pptx

I took part in another panel discussion on standards along with Jerzy Czopik,Freelance Translator and Odette LIÉTAR of IDEST. Monika Popiolek chaired this lively discussion where there were many interesting contributions from the floor.

The conference ended with The Warsaw Pact Debate. We had Chris Durban, Mark Childress, Doug Strock and Reinhard Schaler. I only realized later that this combination of translator, end customer, lsp and academic was perfectly balanced. However, that was not the reason we picked these people. We picked them because we thought they would have some interesting things to say. They did! It was a very lively and interesting debate. One of the things I got out of this is marketing is crucial to improving your business and career and you need to allocate time for marketing.

This was the fifth TM-Europe conference. Susan Starling suggested that with the amount of people blogging about TM-Europe it might lose its reputation as the best kept secret of translation Industry conference. It would be great to welcome more people next year as well as welcome back those who attended this and previous year. I would to thank everyone who made it a successful conference, the programme committee of Mark Childress, Kevin Lossner, Monika Popiolek and myself, the speakers, those who blogged and tweeted and above all those who came to the conference.

See you for TM-Europe 2013.

Reinhard’s blog

http://reinhardschaler.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/no-one-likes-us-i-dont-know-why-tm-europe-warsaw-3-4-october-2012/

Kevin’s blog on TM-Europe

http://www.translationtribulations.com/2012/10/the-future-of-translation-now-in-warsaw.html

Kevin’s blog on Kevin’s presentations

http://www.translationtribulations.com/2012/10/the-buck-stops-where.html

Valerij Tomaranko’s blog

http://anmerkungen-des-uebersetzers.com/2012/10/08/tm-europe-2012-putting-a-face-to-a-name/

Jayne Fox’s blog

http://foxdocs.biz/BetweenTranslations/the-bulk-vs-premium-translation-market-inspiration-from-the-tm-europe-twitter-stream/

TM-Europe Facebook Album (thanks to Stefan Gentz)

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.189691217832483.46812.100003748172867&type=1&l=34bf32297f

Warsaw is really beautiful at the end of September.  I know you possibly have images of white winters in Poland but trust me, summer likes this city and usually tries to stay that bit longer and amazes us with spectacular Indian Summers. Hence, Warsaw is a great place to spend the last few days of September. You will be feeling very good after the brilliant presentation you have just delivered at TM-Europe 2011. A dozen or so attendees will have tweeted immediately about how insightful your presentation was and one will even tweet about how well you looked. You are finishing a beer with some new friends and notice from the business cards that these are the people your sales director told you to meet. What could be more pleasant?

Now you want to know how to achieve this dream. It is very simple  - go to the TM-Europe 2011 website and have a look at the call for papers, http://www.tm-europe.org/callforpapers2011, then write down what you've been meaning to say for years, and submit a proposal. You have until April 30th to submit a paper. This year the conference theme is “Process Management and Standards for the Translation and Localisation Industry”.  The conference gets quite a few submissions and the ones which get selected are those that adhered to the criteria announced in the call for papers and present the most insightful views and original angles.

The second XLIFF Symposium takes place on the pre-conference day of TM-Europe 2011 and the call for papers for that event will be published within a couple of weeks.

The TM-Europe International Conference is a lively event where you get to meet many translation industry people who do not notmally attend other conferences. One of the great things about the conference is the level of expertise, originality and good humour among the audience. It is also a great opportunity to enjoy Warsaw in September and enjoy the famous Polish hospitality.