Case: The European Commission

In July 2012, after a public invitation to tender, the European Commission selected Global Words for approval as a supplier of high quality translations on general and administrative affairs from English to Danish. Global Words was the first on a list of nine approved suppliers, on the grounds that our ‘quality assurance system is systematic, thorough, and well defined in all aspects’.

Since then we have translated a large number of highly diversified texts, including among other things:

• the labour market and employment
• descriptions of Union institutions
• CO2 emissions
• energy
• law
• competition law
• agricultural products
• the environment
• statistics
• state aid
• health
• fraudulent use of EU funds
• education

The European Commission demands translations of sufficiently high quality to be used directly in the administrative work of the EU without the Commission needing to do anything more with them.

Apart from that, very often the writers of these texts are not native speakers of English, while they are such experts in their subject areas that they may take certain things for granted. There may consequently be serious challenges for us as translators in understanding the subject matter and the language.

After the same tendering procedure, we were also approved as suppliers of translations from French into Danish.