Anyone familiar with the Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) field knows how difficult it can be to create a correct, regulatory-compliant SDS in English. At GLTaC, we must take that English SDS and assure it is translated correctly into over 50 languages, with many of those languages having unique requirements based on national hazard communication regulations.
We search diligently for the most knowledgeable, experienced EHS industry experts who are also bilingual. The vast majority of our translation team is currently working in the field and translating for us as well. Some are professional linguists, but regardless of their background, GLTaC requires every translator to pass a rigorous sample translation test. This sample translation consists of a selection of phrases reflecting SDS content, with each phrase sourced to a specific regulatory reference. The translator must correctly translate above 90% for us to have confidence in their abilities.
Our project managers attend training specific to the industry, and GLTaC is the only translation company with long-term membership in the Society for Chemical Hazard Communication (SCHC).
No other translation company puts translations through the review cycle that we do at GLTaC. Several reviewers and editors go through every document following a comprehensive quality assurance process. We compare terminology against hazard communication regulations and maintain over 400 Translation Memories and Termbases derived from EHS standards and laws across the world. We perform automated checks along with manual reviews using a checklist for punctuation, spelling, grammar, numerical consistency, special coding, spacing, capitalization, abbreviations, and technical accuracy.
As the preferred provider of SDS translations to most of the major SDS authoring systems available today, GLTaC can say that our translations appear in over 1,000,000 SDS documents each year worldwide. No other translation company can make that claim.
This is why we put so much care and effort into our work:
Lives Depend on Our Translations. (Video)