Company: Quality Standards
A quality-driven corporate culture adds business value
Tek’s commitment to quality is intrinsic to its ongoing mission: creating business value through process optimization and customized solutions that meet the language needs of life sciences, IT and manufacturing companies launching products globally.
Process optimization is not an end point but a method of continuous improvement. The ongoing use of standards and best practices allows Tek to develop and advance our quality and global management systems to further support your globalization efforts.
We recognize that standards and best practices are a valuable corporate business tool that enhances the effectiveness of operational and monitoring methods. Employee orientation and continuing education programs reinforce our commitment to quality while providing a valuable employee feedback loop that strengthens our processes.
These optimized processes add real business value to any Tek solution that we devise when working with you and contribute to a higher return on investment (ROI) for you, our customer.
To substantiate our commitment to quality, Tek’s quality department ensures that all QA processes are implemented and working effectively companywide. This department also proactively investigates new standards and best practices, implementing those found suitable in order to improve and streamline processes across the company. This provides Tek with a cycle of continuous process improvement.
Quality standards
ISO 9001:2000
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is a worldwide non-governmental organization composed of 157 countries that has developed over 17,000 standards to date.
The ISO 9001:2000 standard specifies the requirements for quality management systems that help meet customer and regulatory requirements, enhancing customer satisfaction. It includes requirements for the continual improvement of these systems.
Tek has been using the ISO 9001:2000 standard as a management tool (among others) for over 5 years, to help ensure the design, implementation and improvement of:
- Effective processes to provide services which meet customer expectations.
- Measurement methods to enhance customer satisfaction.
The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) is composed of 30 national European members who develop European Standards (ENs) in various sectors in order to build internal European markets for goods and services. Some of these standards are voluntary, whereas others have been made effectively mandatory under EU law.
The EN15038:2006 standard is the only accreditation designed specifically for translation services. It specifies the requirements / best practices for:
- The translation process itself, in addition to the quality and project management systems to be implemented.
- The provision, qualification and assessment of suppliers and technical resources involved in the translation process.
- The contractual framework with the customer.
Best practices and industry standards
EVM (Earned Value Management)
Tek’s globalization management system, the OneWorld Platform, uses EVM techniques, a best practice in the project management field adopted by most world-class organizations and supported by all project management software on the market.
EVM combines the measurements of technical performance, schedule performance and cost performance within a single integrated methodology. The goals of the system are to:
- Integrate project work scope, schedules and cost objectives into a baseline plan against which accomplishments may be measured.
- Objectively assess accomplishments at the work performance level.
- Analyze significant variances from the plan and forecast impacts.
- Provide data to management / customers.
The XLIFF standard, created by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), is designed to define and promote the adoption of a specification for the interchange of localizable software and document based objects and related metadata, through extensible XML vocabularies.
Tek’s proprietary tools, the Language Quality Checker (LQC) and the Tek Converter are XLIFF compliant.
The LQC automatically identifies linguistic and terminological errors to speed up and improve translation quality control at the final QA stage, while the Tek Converter permits the easy exchange of files among different repository formats. This allows translation memories to be generated from different formats such as glossaries or bilingual files. The Tek Converter supports .rtf, .doc, .tmx, .ttx, .csv, .xls, .xliff and Translator's Workbench .txt and produces outputs into .txt, .csv, .tmx and Translator's Workbench .txt.
TBX (Term Base eXchange)
The TBX, created by the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) is the open, XML-based standard for exchanging structured terminological data. Tek’s Linguistic and Terminology specialists contribute with our customer base in streamlining and recommending approaches to implement Enterprise Terminology Management (ETM) solutions in this format.
TMX (Translation Memory eXchange)
Created by LISA, the TMX is a standard for the exchange of translation memory (TM) data created by computer-aided translation (CAT) and localization tools. The purpose of the TMX is to allow for the easier exchange of translation memory data between tools and / or translation vendors with little or no loss of critical data during the process.
Tek’s proprietary tools – the Language Quality Checker (LQC) and the Tek Converter are both TMX compliant.
