ISO 17100: What Does It Actually Require From a Translation Service?

iso17100 # Why Does ISO 17100 Exist?

Q. ISO 17100 sounds like a paperwork exercise. What problem does it actually solve?

A. Translation quality is inherently hard for a client to inspect directly, they often can't read the target language well enough to judge the work themselves. ISO 17100 solves this by standardizing the process rather than the output: it defines exactly what a professional translation service provider must do, who is allowed to work on a project, and how that work must be checked, so a client can trust the result without having to verify it personally.

ISO 17100:2015 replaced the earlier European standard EN 15038:2006 and is reviewed roughly every five years. It is one of the most widely recognized quality certifications in the translation industry, and as covered in Part 4 of this series, it forms one leg of a three-standard framework alongside ISO 18587 and ISO 5060.

Q. What exactly falls outside ISO 17100's scope?

A. Machine translation output and post-editing workflows are explicitly excluded. ISO 17100 was published in 2015, when MT was still a marginal part of most production workflows, and it was written with human translation in mind from end to end. This exclusion is precisely why ISO 18587 had to be created two years later, to cover the part of the production lifecycle ISO 17100 deliberately leaves out.

The Four Requirement Areas ISO 17100 Defines

Q. What does ISO 17100 actually require, structurally?

A. The standard organizes its requirements into four areas, covering the entire lifecycle of a translation project:

Area	Core Question It Answers
Resources	Are the people working on this project actually qualified?
Pre-Production	Were the project's parameters and agreement properly defined before work began?
Production	Was the translation produced, reviewed, and verified through a defined workflow?
Post-Production	Is there a documented, auditable record of how the project closed out?

Resources: Who Is Allowed to Work on a Certified Project?

Q. What are the actual competence requirements for a translator under ISO 17100?

A. ISO 17100's Annex A defines six competence areas a translator must demonstrate:

Competence Area	What It Means in Practice
Translation competence	Ability to produce a target-language text that is faithful, idiomatic, and fit for purpose
Linguistic & textual competence	Command of grammar, style, and discourse conventions in both source and target language
Research, information acquisition & processing competence	Ability to verify terminology and unfamiliar content efficiently and reliably
Cultural competence	Understanding of source and target culture, including locale conventions and register
Technical competence	Proficiency with the tools, formats, and systems used in production
Domain competence	Sufficient subject-matter expertise in the relevant field

On top of competence, the translator must hold documented evidence of qualification through one of three accepted routes: a degree in translation or linguistics, an unrelated degree plus at least two years of full-time professional translation experience, or at least five years of full-time professional translation experience with no formal degree requirement.

Q. Does this apply only to translators, or to other roles on the project too?

A. It extends to revisers and project managers as well, with different requirements for each. Revisers must hold the same competence profile as translators, since revision requires the ability to independently judge translation quality, often at a more senior level. Project managers are held to a different standard centered on coordination: defining project parameters correctly, managing resourcing and scheduling, and ensuring the workflow below is actually followed end to end.

Pre-Production: What Has to Happen Before Work Begins?

Q. What does ISO 17100 require before a translator even opens the file?

A. A formalized agreement between the LSP and the client that defines project parameters explicitly rather than leaving them implicit: the language pair, intended use of the translation, deadline, file format, target audience, and any special instructions, style guides, or terminology resources. The standard's logic here is that most downstream quality disputes trace back to a parameter that was assumed rather than agreed in writing.

Production: The Mandated Workflow

Q. What is the actual production process ISO 17100 requires?

A. A four-step sequence, and this is the part of the standard most often misunderstood or quietly skipped by non-certified providers:

Step	What Happens	Performed By
1. Translation	Initial translation of the source content	A qualified translator
2. Self-review	The translator checks their own output against the source	The same translator
3. Independent revision	A bilingual comparison of target against source, performed by someone other than the original translator	A second qualified professional
4. Final verification	A check that the deliverable meets the agreed project parameters before release	Project manager or designated reviewer

Key insight: independent revision is the cornerstone of ISO 17100, and it is also the step most frequently cut for cost or speed by providers who are not certified. Self-review alone cannot substitute for it, a translator is structurally less likely to catch their own errors than a second qualified person comparing target against source line by line.

Q. Is "revision" the same thing as a general readability check?

A. No, and the standard is specific about this. Revision means a bilingual comparison against the source text by a second qualified linguist, checking for accuracy as well as language quality. A monolingual readability pass, sometimes called review, checks only whether the target text reads naturally, without verifying it against the source. ISO 17100 requires the former as a mandatory step; a monolingual review can be added on top, but cannot replace it.

Post-Production: What Happens After Delivery?

Q. Does ISO 17100's responsibility end once the file is delivered?

A. No. The standard requires documented project closure, a defined process for handling client feedback and complaints, traceability of who worked on which assignment, and retention of evidence of translator and reviser qualifications. This is what makes the certification auditable after the fact, not just a one-time checklist at project kickoff.

How Does Certification Actually Work?

Q. Is ISO 17100 self-declared, or does someone actually check?

A. It is third-party audited. An accredited certification body reviews the LSP's documented processes, qualification records, and project workflows against the standard's requirements, and issues a certificate that typically specifies the scope it covers, such as particular language pairs or sectors. Certification is maintained through periodic surveillance audits, not a single one-time check, so an LSP has to keep operating to the standard continuously, not just at the moment of certification.

What Happens When a Requirement Is Skipped?

Q. Can you map specific gaps in ISO 17100 compliance to the risks they create?

Skipped Requirement	Resulting Risk
Unqualified translator assigned	Domain or terminology errors that a competent professional would have caught
No independent revision, self-review only	Errors the original translator is psychologically unlikely to catch in their own work
Project parameters not formalized upfront	Scope disputes, missed special instructions, rework after delivery
No documented qualification evidence	No defensible answer when a client or auditor asks who actually worked on the project
No post-production feedback process	Recurring errors go uncorrected because there is no structured channel to surface them

Closing Thought: Should ISO 17100 and ISO 18587 Merge in the AI-MT Era?

Q. Now that AI-MT plus post-editing is the dominant production model at most LSPs, does it still make sense to keep ISO 17100 and ISO 18587 as two separate standards?

A. This is a question worth sitting with rather than answering definitively, and the case for keeping them separate is getting thinner.

The argument for merging is straightforward: ISO 18587's competence requirements are almost a restatement of ISO 17100's six areas, with domain competence and one genuinely new addition, MT literacy, layered on top. Most LSPs today run hybrid production, some projects fully human-translated, some MTPE, often within the same account, so qualifying staff against two separate documents with largely overlapping competence requirements starts to look like duplicated paperwork rather than a meaningful quality distinction.

The argument for keeping them separate is just as real, though. Human translation from scratch and post-editing AI-MT output are genuinely different production workflows, even where the underlying linguistic competence overlaps, and collapsing them into one standard risks blurring a distinction that high-stakes clients, legal, medical, regulatory, increasingly want to see stated explicitly: was this fully human-translated, or AI-MT plus post-edited? A merged standard could make that harder to certify and communicate clearly, exactly when some clients are starting to ask the question directly.

Closing thought: as AI-MT becomes the default production path rather than the exception, the industry may need to decide whether the value of ISO 17100 and ISO 18587 lies in being two standards that map cleanly to two distinct workflows, or one standard that reflects the reality that most translators today move fluidly between both. There may not be a clean answer yet, but it is a question the standards bodies, and the LSPs that hold both certifications, are likely to face sooner rather than later.