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On May 17th, 2017, our Prague office and production center, together with its office in Tokyo, was certified for its quality management system as being compliant with the extensive requirements in the ISO 9001:2016 standard. The certificate was awarded by the local Czech subsidiary of the TÜV SÜD accreditation body. This award affirms idioma’s high quality standing against this most recent ISO 9001 version of the standard with even stricter requirements.
The approval process to obtain this certification has been ongoing since the beginning of the year. “While we have covered a wide range of topics related to our processes as an international language service provider, surprisingly we already had many measures in place that met and even went beyond the requirements on quality management,” says General Manager Jan Valenta. “Our offices are connected by an in-house developed intranet system that also manages job flows, receives orders placed online by clients and makes sure nothing fails in the translation processes. The auditors were actually surprised at some of the implemented quality measures in this system,” he adds.
idioma has long been emphasizing quality as a key feature of its translation services. In its sales and development efforts, kaizen is an important principle whereby there is a continuous quest for improvement. “It is such a fundamental attitude that if something goes wrong once, you fix it, and even when you know something works well, you should still consider whether it can be done better and more efficiently. This is our general approach in everything we do and the reason why the translation and QA tools we have developed work so well. Becoming ISO 9001 certified affirms this policy.” says company spokesman John O’Connor.
The company, however, has no plans to rest on its laurels. On the contrary it plans to step up its sales efforts, especially to potential clients where ISO 9001 certification is a mandatory requirement. In the past two years, the company was ranked among Asia’s Top 30 Language Service Providers by CSA Research. Marketing Manager Romana Olexova has new plans for growth: “The language industry is undergoing rapid change, but with ISO 9001 certification in our hands and backed up by our official registration for the DIN EN ISO 17100 translation standard, we stand much stronger with proven quality management. The certifications reaffirm our strong position on quality to our clients, who will appreciate our drive to only deliver the best in terms of professional translation by humans.”
