Cogen's translation QA process goes full circle and is ISO 9001:2008 certified -
for your peace of mind.

Well translated documentation is crucial to the success of your company on your international markets.
Accurately translated and clearly phrased information will make your customers prefer your brands, time and time again.
It will make your products easy to use and to maintain without the help of a call center, and expedite their certification process by regulatory bodies.

Cogen applies a full circle translation QA which covers all the steps, from the selection of the best translators to the analysis and monitoring of your reviewers feedback.

It all starts with finding the right people -

Cogen's translator profiling process is unique: for each new customer, our Language Resources Team pre-selects translators on their experience in the subject matter and their references. After a first internal screening on their professional quality, at least three samples per language pair are submitted to the customer, asking for his preference.
Based on that feedback, a team is put in place (one main translator and at least one back-up), which will handle all your assignments and which Cogen's translation project management tool will assign by default to your projects.
From then on, a relationship grows between translators, in-country reviewers and customer contacts, strengthened over the years by training sessions, meetings, and exchanges through Cogen's translation project management portal.

But they need some help - a terminology tool, ...

Each company has a unique set of terms and expressions which, if used consistently in all languages, increases the quality and readability of product documentation. To make sure that terminology is adhered to, Cogen has developed a terminology management tool which highlights, in the content sent for translation and for review, all occurrences of your glossary terms, with their translation.

... in-context terminology searches in your translation memory,

For the duration of each translation project, Cogen opens the access to your translation memory to all translators and reviewers at work, so they can check terms and phrases in context. The search is multi-directional, from each source to each target language, and pulls up results within a paragraph and with the document name it comes from.

... feedback from your in-country staff,

The feedback of your in-country reviewers in precious: they know best how to talk to your customers. Cogen has developed an application which cross-references the reviewed content with the original translated content, and highlights the differences. At the end of each project, the output of this analysis is sent to the translator, for future reference.

... QA technology,

Cogen's validation application verifies that your source and translated content remain perfectly aligned at all times: it cross-checks, after translation and after each review iteration, the overall document length, the number of content segments, the figures, the formatting.

All supported by metrics.

My.cogen.com, Cogen's translation project management portal, illustrates the output of these tools with metrics about the content review percentages and the evolution of the quality ratings of your reviewers, as well as project status follow-up.

March 2010 - An independent report looking at the translation processes employed by 187 companies of various sizes, industries and geographies, has found that the best-in-class performers systematically track the reuse of translated content and, in so doing, reduce translation costs by 17%.

The report concludes :

"The best-in-class performers are 1.5 times as likely as the industry average to track the reuse of content.

By tracking performance in this way, they can identify where and when they are able to reuse translations.
This helps drive continuous improvement in how content is developed, applied and leveraged, ultimately enabling these companies to reduce translation costs by 17%".

To extend these advantages to its customers, Cogen provides online access to a content harmonization tool, and metrics about content reuse evolution, through a secure portal.

Read more ...

Directive 2007/47/EC amends Directive 90/385/EEC on active implantable medical devices and Directive 93/42/EEC on medical devices.

The changes concern, among others, the essential requirements which medical devices must satisfy in order to be lawfully placed on the market, the corresponding conformity assessment procedures and the classification of devices.

Since Directive 2007/47/EC is addressed to the Member States, preliminary transposition into national law is indispensable for the application of the corresponding provision by the various economic operators.

Article 4 of the Directive states that the Member States "shall apply the transposition measures as from March 21 , 2010".

As no provision is made for a period of transition, a number of questions have been raised, and the following interpretation by the Commission's services are meant to be a guide to uniform practice throughout the EU.

June 2009. Cogen's quality management system receives additional formal recognition.

Lloyd's Register Quality Assurance (LRQA), a worldwide quality registrar, has conducted an independent audit and found Cogen to be in full compliance with the ISO 9001:2008 standard.

"This certification is the result of the company's continuous commitment to quality" said Véronique Respaut, Quality Management Expert at Cogen, on receiving the news. "As our customers know very well, the whole company, from the CEO to each team member, has its mind set on improving quality on an everyday basis".

Cogen was previously ISO 9001:2000 certified. "Simply renewing that certification was not enough for us" Véronique Respaut adds. "We wanted to offer better guarantees to our customers that the way our customer-focused processes are managed perfectly meets their service requirements.

The standard addes more stringent requirements, such as:

• Inclusion of statutory and regulatory requirements alongside those of the customer;
• Integration of outsourced process control within the quality management system;
• Clarification on human resources competence requirements;
• Details regarding post-delivery activities;
• Extension of customer satisfaction monitoring sources
• Greater protection of customer assets, including personal and confidential data;

"What I am particularly proud of is that Cogen is awarded this certification for the full scope of its activities", notes Hélène Keufgens, CEO of Cogen. "That Cogen's repeatable processes should be recognised as watertight is invaluable to our international customers, some of which operate in highly regultated industries".

For further information, please contact :

Véronique Respaut : +32 6789 2517 - This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Cogen is an ISO 9001:2008 certified language service provider, serving customers in the US, Europe and Asia since 1980.

Our mission is to help manufacturers of industrial equipment, medical devices and complex consumer products to create more product documentation, in more languages, within controlled, repeatable and metrics-driven processes that guarantee quality consistency, cost containment and reduced throughput times.

Cogen offers international project management services, consultancy in translation process optimization, glossary management, translation and multilingual publishing services.

May 2009 : new terminology management application released

Cogen unveils a new terminology management application to help customers reach world markets with better accuracy and shorter timeframes.

Ensuring the quality and rapid availability of product literature is critical for manufacturers in all sectors. Cogen's new terminology management application enables all parties involved to achieve better results, and in less time, when producing multilingual documentation.

"The vast majority of issues in technical publications stem from terminology inaccuracies", says Hélène Keufgens, CEO of Cogen. "By providing translators and reviewers with a powerful tool to ensure the right terminology is used in the right place at the right time, Cogen helps make product literature more understandable to the end user. As a result, companies can get products to market faster, and their competitive advantage is increased by the quality of the accompanying manuals".

One of the challenges faced by global manufacturing companies is to have a structured, centralised approach to terminology. Whatever the existing situation, Cogen can provide guidance to create, enhance and maintain a multilingual glossary.

Cogen integrates such customer glossaries as an extra layer into its translation memory leveraging process. In the files sent out for translation and review, all terms in the source language found in the glossary are highlighted and their preferred translations provided. This ensures that translators and reviewers consistently employ the same term for the same concept, enabling them to work faster and more accurately.

"Our translation memory leveraging technology already helps achieve cost and time efficiencies. Our new tool adds to these efficiencies and further enhances quality by focussing specifically on ensuring terminology consistency", Keufgens explains.

For manufacturers faced with the double challenge of reducing time to market and providing high-quality multilingual technical literature to their customers, Cogen's new terminology management application makes a substantial difference.

"We have invested in this application based on our extensive experience of working with leading global manufacturers and have seen pilot deployments with existing clients quickly prove the additional value of our new tool", she concludes.


Cogen is an ISO 9001:2008 certified language service provider, serving customers in the US, Europe and Asia since 1980. 
Our mission is to help manufacturers of industrial equipment, medical devices and complex consumer products to create more product documentation, in more languages, within controlled, repeatable and metrics-driven processes that quarantee quality, consistency, cost containment and a shorter delivery timeframe.

Cogen offers international project managment services, consultancy in translation process optimisation, glossary management, translation and multilingual publishing services.


For further information, please contact:

Jean Mandron, Business Development Manager
(+33 1 46 91 89 14, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Hélène Keufgens, CEO
(+32 6789 2514, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

April 2009 : Cogen uses Levenshtein algorithm to calculate fuzzy matching

Fuzzy matching is a popular method for leveraging content from a translation memory, where matches are less than 100% perfect, ie. are not "full matches".

Cogen has now re-written its fuzzy matching algorithm to incorporate the edit distance measurement as defined by Russian scientist Vladimir Levenshtein. The Levenshtein distance is a metric used for measuring the difference between two sequences (ie. the "edit distance"). It is often used in applications that need to determine how similar, or different, two character strings are - such as spell checkers.

In the application of Translation Memory, the Levenshtein algorithm offers some major advantages:

It is rigorously precise in calculating the matching percentage. In our algorithm, the "fuzziness" treshold is set at 60%: as soon as 60% of the content matches, two segments are considered to have a fuzzy match, which reduces the translation fee by 50%. Consequently, the translation fees for fuzzy matches are more economical than the translation industry's commonly used standard.

The algorithm is perfectly suited to logographic writing systems such as Chinese and Japanese.

It increases translation memory reuse, reducing the translation turnaround time, and improving the translation quality.

To receive a copy of Cogen's white paper on the Levenshtein algorithm, please contact:

Jean Mandron, Business Development Manager
(+33 1 46 91 89 14, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Hélène Keufgens, CEO
(+32 6789 2514, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )