According to ISO 17100 Translation services — Requirements for translation services (see footnote), a language professional is qualified if there is documented evidence that they meet at least one of the following requirements in section 3.1.4 (as amended in 2017):
a) has obtained a degree in translation, linguistics or language studies or an equivalent degree that includes significant translation training, from a recognized institution of higher education;
b) has obtained a degree in any other field from a recognized institution of higher education and has the equivalent of two years of full-time professional experience in translating;
c) has the equivalent of five years of full-time professional experience in translating.
These criteria are realistic for only a handful of language combinations out of over a million potential combinations. It was pointed out that the number of language combinations is highly reduced if English is used as a pivot language. However, the use of a pivot language introduces issues.
If we impose these criteria only when both languages in a combination are high-resource languages, then, for low-resource languages, we can use the ASTM F2575-23 criteria, which are focused on finding a language professional with evidence of needed competence in the following six areas:
- Translation (including research skills), but no degree or minimum number of years of experience being required.
- Linguistic skills, including language proficiency test scores and years of residence and professional activity in relevant countries.
- Subject matter expertise (for domain-specific language) and cultural knowledge (for general language).
- Type-of-text competence relevant to the project at hand.
- Task competence relevant to the project (localization, subtitling, audio transcription, etc.).
- Technology competence in the tools relevant to the project.
Bottom line, a professional translator can qualify using either the ASTM or the ISO criteria mentioned above.