The quality of a translation depends on several criteria: the semantics (conveying the meaning), the register (conveying the same tone, depending on the purpose for which the document is intended) and consistent use of terminology (particularly for a legal or technical document). Meeting deadlines is also an important quality criterion.

Our aim is always to provide a quality translation which has been validated and can be used by our customers. Translators take care to eliminate any ambiguity or confusion in the source text and contact our customers to resolve queries when necessary. The first version is then re-read by a different translator and any points that remain to be clarified are marked with comments for the customer.

Terms can be validated either on the basis of Internet searches or bibliographies or by contacting colleagues and sometimes by calling on external consultants: in some cases, the customers themselves will validate the choices.

We regularly work on sensitive projects, whether technological or a business-oriented.

Our IT security procedures and tools enable us to ensure the confidentiality of the information we handle.

File transfers can be completely secured via our extranet with three levels of security: login, password and encryption.

With our customers’ consent, each translation is fed into a specific translation memory which matches source and target language segments, using the SDL Trados Studio 2017© software package. This translation memory is specific for each customer. It is made available to translators for each new translation project.

We also use an online terminology forum/database called Aplikaterm.

Once a translation has been delivered, finalised and validated by a customer, it is integrated in a translation memory (SDL Trados Studio 2017©). For recurrent documents, the validated text can be retrieved automatically whenever there is redundancy between two versions or between sections of documents. The software enables us to estimate the redundancy rate ahead of time and to discount redundant parts from the quotation.

For some particularly repetitive documents (for example, some administrative documents), the redundancy rate may be quite high (50% or more in extreme cases). In this case, only the text which has not yet been translated is invoiced at the normal cost. Consequently we systematically try to save money for our customers.