About the office
A small team working to a narrow brief: documentation for people who manufacture things. We have no ambition to be a large agency and turn down work that would require becoming one.
How we work
Every project has one person responsible for it from the first reading of the source material to the final check of the layout. Clients deal with that person directly rather than through an account manager, which is only practical because we keep the number of concurrent projects low.
Translators are long-standing freelance colleagues rather than a rotating pool. There are fewer of them than a larger office would list, and they cover fewer subject areas; the trade is that the person translating a hydraulics manual this year translated the previous version of it two years ago.
Subject areas
- Machine building and metalworking equipment
- Hydraulics and pneumatics
- Industrial electrical installation
- Packaging and food-processing lines
- Occupational safety documentation and risk assessments
Outside these we decline, or accept only the editing and layout part and leave the translation to someone who knows the field. Clients occasionally find this irritating. It is still the right answer.
Quality, without the certificate
We are not certified to ISO 17100 and do not intend to seek it. The standard's central requirement — that a second qualified person reviews every translation — is how we already work, and is written into our terms. What certification would add is an audit trail, and for clients who need that audit trail we are the wrong supplier and will say so at the quoting stage.
What we will provide on request: the name and qualification of the reviewer for a given document, the glossary used, and a record of the questions raised during the project and how they were resolved.
Capacity
Roughly 300 to 400 source pages a month across all projects. When the book is full we say so and give a date rather than accepting the work and delivering late. In practice July and December are the months when this is most likely.
A note on long projects
Documentation work tends to arrive in bursts around a product launch and then go quiet for a year. We would rather hold a retainer arrangement that keeps the glossary alive between bursts than re-learn a client's terminology from scratch every time. If that suits, it is worth discussing at the start rather than after the second project.
