Rheinschrift Language Services, a Cologne-based language service provider (LSP), announced on July 2 that it has received its ISO 18587 certification — this announcement comes just a few months after the company announced that it had achieved its ISO 17100 re-certification back in March. The ISO 18587 consists of a series of regulations for companies using machine translation (MT) to ensure a translation’s quality in the post-editing phase.

Rheinschrift had been working with ISO 17100 certifications for many years and was re-certified back in March 2021 — ISO 17100 consists of a series of standards for companies providing translation services to adhere to, however the use of MT is generally considered to be outside of the ISO 17100’s regulations. ISO 18587, on the other hand, includes standards for companies that use MT — the post-editing process consists of editing of MT output by professional human translators. ISO 18587 is an internationally used standard for companies that utilize an MT engine for its translation.

While MT has certainly made strides in recent years, it still lags in comparison to human translation, which is why a post-editing process is typically employed in instances where MT is used. This allows professional human translators to make sure there are no errors and adjust parts of a given text before the final product is delivered to the client. Thus, post-editing is used to ensure that there is no major quality difference between what is produced using MT and what would be produced by a human translator. 

While Rheinschrift has been offering post-editing services for MT products for the last 15 years, the company has just now received its ISO 18587 certification for the first time.

In its announcement on July 2, Rheinschrift also noted that it is working to expand the services it currently offers. Since 2020, the company has been exploring other projects, many of which involve data collection for the training of artificial intelligence. The company currently employs 400 professional translators and linguists to offer their language services.