What Are the Benefits of ISO 9001 Certification for Translation Agencies?

Zbyněk Zelenka

25. 4. 2024

Certification = systematic quality management = better translation quality = more customer satisfaction.

This “equation” is a simple expression of certification’s main goal, which is indeed customer satisfaction.

A certificate is a formal confirmation that an agency has a quality management system that is compliant with the ISO 9001 standard.

Our company has passed many external ISO 9001 audits by now, and we still see our certification as a benefit to our customers as much as ever, because:

• The quality of our translations is higher thanks to the verification mechanisms included in the quality management system. This amounts to verification of all the usual work carried out at a translation agency, as well as keeping various statistics, evaluating suppliers, assessing customer satisfaction, etc.
• Our quality management system is actually used for managing and improving all of our processes, that is, the quality of not just our translations, but also our whole company’s management. Our system wasn’t built up just so we could boast about it with a certificate proudly displayed on our wall (or website). We use it in our daily work, from processing customer enquiries, to HR work, processing our methodology documents, performing our own translations, making final translation checks, and planning all our activities.
• It makes us more trustworthy for major customers. Our customers – who themselves must meet the criteria of a variety of standards and pass audits of their own and have their own quality certificates – are very much able to judge why a certified company is a better partner.

We can definitely recommend the introduction of a quality management system to every translation agency that has not done so already. However, it’s important that you line up this system to comply with ISO 17100 as well. You’ll find more details on this in our article “ISO 17100 – The Globally Recognized Standard for Translation Services.”