Assuring Translation Quality

Following a record year in 2006 we have continued to grow our infrastructure. With expanded offices and over 25 in-house members of staff we have the scalability and flexibility to meet the most demanding of needs. As well as growth in our production team, head-counts have increased in both our post-translation processing and technical service areas, to accommodate the rise in projects involving DTP and localization engineering/testing – clear signs that there continues to be a strong demand for a supplier delivering a total solution.

As a service-oriented organisation we strive to achieve the highest standards of quality. To this end we are pleased to confirm that our quality control processes and procedures have recently been fully audited by BSI, successfully extending our ISO 9001:2000 registration, which we have held since 2001. By its very design ISO 9001:2000 drives continual improvement in the quality of LIT’s product and service offering, creating the need to constantly measure and improve our internal processes and procedures.

In order to raise our standards we regularly examine our performance, focusing on a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) including turnaround time for quotations, on-time and to-spec deliveries, customer complaints and customer satisfaction levels.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys involve interviewing a random group of clients every month. This ensures that all clients are regularly surveyed and surveys are used to follow up on customer experience. We obtain feedback on:

• Quality of the deliverables: terminology, spelling, grammar, writing style, consistency, compliance with reference material, DTP quality and engineering quality.

• Quality of service: timeliness of response to enquiry, presentation of quotations, the accessibility and responsiveness of our personnel, meeting project deadlines, flexibility and value for money.

LIT uses an extensive network of highly experienced mother-tongue translators, each with specialist sector knowledge. In order to achieve premium quality 2007 has seen the introduction of an enhanced Translation Quality Management (TQM) metric, whereby all current and new vendors are formally assessed and rated to maintain a consistent standard against which translation quality can be objectively measured.

Our goals remain unchanged – we are fully committed to assisting and supporting our customers in gaining global success. Currently rated at 93% (in terms of how satisfied our customers are with the quality of our services overall), the standard of excellence we strive for is based upon the European Foundation for Quality Management  (EFQM) model.