Why did we build a cooperative?
After a vast amount of positive – and unfortunately some negative – experience in our professional life, we decided to restart our work in a cooperative way with equal rights (and obligations) in order to provide our clients with optimum solutions for their specific demand on translation, localization, and interpreting services.
In Germany, a cooperative is a rather old type of company subject to specific rules and regulations. Banks and real estate companies are prominent examples (our house bank is a cooperative, too). We intensively evaluated various types of companies. And although we do not know any cooperative in our industry, we are convinced to have found the ideal type.
In a cooperative, decisions are made by all members based on the one member, one vote principle. And by law, profits of the cooperative are distributed to all of the members equally! The cooperative is not allowed to make profits. It is supposed to „promote the needs of its members“.
Hence, our cooperative is not intended to grow as fast as possible in order to be sold at some time in the future. It is forming the ideal environment for us to focus on creating and maintaining optimum solutions for our clients.
Aren’t we too small?
Global Network
In today’s global world, the means and capabilities of language service providers are determined by the size, the structure, and the quality of their global network. No service provider of any size can deliver a comprehensive service without specialized translators and accompanying experts in the target countries. In many years, we created a vast, stable, and proven network with some help from organizations like GALA and ELIA.
Toolset
These days, you can easily find very good and mature, commercially available tools for translation, translation management, terminology work, quality assurance, quality control, data exchange, layout work, etc. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. On the other hand, there are cases in which you are facing special challenges to be solved by customizations or special developments only. In these cases, we are developing database-driven solutions or utilize tools often developed outside our industry, but helping us to master our challenges.
One Size Fits All? Not at all!
The solution perfect for one client may be completely useless for another. We are convinced that each and every customer deserves the right to enjoy our full endeavors to solve his or her tasks optimally and not just get a service „off the shelf“.