The history of ASCO dates back before the early ‘90s, when translations were done using a typewriter. Nowadays the ASCO team provides translation services for clients from several continents with yearly turnovers of hundreds of thousands of Euro using the most modern computer aided translation tools.
In the ‘70s and ’80s, before the ASCO company was set up, we translated occasionally, a few times a week emigration documents of German ethnics that were emigrating to Germany. When in the early ’90s we faced an immense flow of translations of vehicle registration and emigration documents, we initially ”doubled” our translation capacity, by borrowing a second typewriter from a neighbor, but later the activity was fully computerized, being thus propelled locally into a leading position for several years to come.
If in the early ’90s the company profile was 99% oriented towards notarized translation of template-based documents, performed for thousands of clients, and the range of languages covered around 20 foreign languages. Starting the late ‘90s the activity gradually shifted towards the Internet. Now, after 30 years, more than 80% of our orders, that do not require certification, but which still need to be translated very well, originate from foreign clients, whereas only 20% come from local clients, that still require translations certified by an authorized translator. Only a small share of the latter also require notarization. After 30 years of activity as a company, even if the range of languages remained diverse, the real demand narrowed in to German and English, with more and more specialized texts. For such content, the necessary quality procedures are more strict, so that the requirements of the standards in the translation industry, first EN15038, and later ISO17100, were met over 15-20 years in advance, before these standards were even defined, as the company had implemented since it was set up, we’d say in a ”visionary” way, a quality system based on translation plus revision, performed by a second translator.
This requirement was only later accredited by the above-mentioned norms, but it is an indispensable condition for quality translations. The proof that this quality was appreciated by clients, is the constant positioning of the turnover at a high level, with a 1:4 ratio between domestic versus foreign orders, that reach us over the Internet. We provide services for 3 of the first 10 global language service providers, ranked by Common Sense Advisory.
