Providing words for a world of technology
Our mission as a company is to meet all the needs of our customers in the technical documentation area, from the analysis of requirements and the formulation of concepts to the definition of the document structure, text drafting, copywriting, layout, creation or adaptation of graphical material, translation to all the target languages the customer may need, and printing or posting to online or electronic platforms.
We endeavor to deliver, in every document we handle, an outstanding level of technical reliability and style and formal quality, responsiveness in every single phase of our relation with the customer, and an unmatched speed of work, enabling us to confidently meet the tightest deadlines. To achieve this, we have set up a highly specialized and experienced team of professionals and a streamlined and efficient organizational structure, designed to minimize the cost of the service for the customer while ensuring an outstanding quality level down to the finest detail.
Entrusting to a specialized provider like PARÁMETRO all the language services of your company guarantees the consistency and quality of your documentation, in addition to providing substantial cost savings from synergies and avoided redundant work.
Manuel Baselga López
Founder and leader of the company, Manuel Baselga López holds an advanced degree in Telecommunication Engineering and has a strong background as a linguist, translator, technical author and terminologist, with over 30-year experience in translation, technical and creative writing, design and authoring of specialized technical documentation in a broad array of sectors, from engineering in all its variants to financial and business documentation, marketing and advertising, as well as legal documentation. With over 30 million words of experience behind and customers in over twenty countries, he is currently one of Spain’s most experienced professionals in the translation and technical documentation business.
Alongside his longstanding work in the language business, his career has been closely linked to the digital communication world from the early days of the internet in the 80s. He has a proven track record as an IT systems architect and software engineer, having created many software products and platforms related to data processing, data communications and multimedia broadcast.
An expert team tailored to the needs of each project
To meet the requirements of our clients in the technical documentation field, we provide a cross-functional team of specialists in the following areas:
- Technical writers with broad experience writing specialized contents in many different formats.
- Technical translators of proven reliability, with a specialization profile tuned to the needs of each project, and demonstrated writing skills in the target language.
- Programmers capable to develop custom tools for the implementation of online information delivery platforms, automation of document management processes, localization of software in any language and computing environment, and large-scale processing of big volumes of structured and unstructured data.
- Project managers, who usually take part in the projects as highly skilled resources, thus gaining a hands-on perspective of the processes involved.
- Terminologists preparing technical glossaries for the standardization of the terms used in the documentation.
- Layout designers experienced in the most widely used typesetting tools for different languages and alphabets, both Western and Asian.
- Graphic designers and artists for creation of illustrations, exploded views, pictures and all sorts of supporting visuals.
We excel at rush, big projects.
Our organization is optimized to process large volumes of documentation under extremely tight time constraints and with guaranteed technical accuracy and style quality.
The professionalism and experience of our specialists, combined with the agility and flexibility of our organizational structure, has allowed us to successfully accomplish, often in a few days, massive documentation projects that have enabled our customers to deliver and win multi-million tenders.
We are proud to have contributed with our effort to the growth and success of many leading companies.
Quality is not a simple word
Our idea of quality goes far beyond a mere marketing slogan or a set phrase intended to sell the benefits of our services. We see quality as specific target that we define, formulate and measure.
Our approach as a company in the field of technical documentation services seeks to achieve consistent quality as a standard of excellence in five key areas:
| Technical quality | We strive to create documents delivering all the information with no errors, accurately and with the proper terminology. |
| Style quality | Accuracy and correctness are paramount in every technical text, but these attributes must go in hand with a clear and elegant writing style, essential for a technical text to meet its intended purpose: communicating complex concepts in a clear, concise and unambiguous manner. |
| Learning quality | The documents used by our customers must not only deliver information, but convey knowledge in an efficient way. That is why we attach the highest value to their effectiveness from the learning perspective. We strive to fully understand all the topics we work with in order to be able to explain them well, so that our documents can be perfectly understood by the target readers. |
| Visual quality | We also strive to optimize the visual appearance of the documents as a tool to convey the information in a more effective manner. A well-designed format makes reading easier and helps the user find the relevant information faster, at a glance, in addition to transmitting a feel of quality that strenghtens the brand image of the company. |
| Service quality | We try hard to reach perfection in all the phases of customer interaction, from the technical communications exchanged during the performance of the works to the administrative management of the projects themselves. Paying attention to the detail, but streamlining our workflows to avoid unnecessary processes or operations that could slow down the work or involve avoidable extra costs. |
We speak your language. Directly.
Many language services agencies boasting to have vast resources to undertake any kind of work are actually intermediaries operating as mere commercial brokers between the customer and a variable network of partners with whom they only maintain a depersonalized and desultory relationship. In these companies, the person operating as the point of contact with the customer may not be directly involved in the documentation translation or creation work, so any interaction needed with the target user of the document must traverse a number of «intermediate layers» that hinder communication, lead to distorsions and misunderstandings, increase costs and delay project completion deadlines.
With PARÁMETRO, the contact person dealing with the customer is always a specialist directly involved in the project. An expert who speaks the same language and is capable to clarify doubts, work out eventual problems and meet the specific needs of the customer in a straightforward and immediate way, with no delays or misunderstandings. Accommodating with full flexibility to the work times, methods and particular requirements of the customer and the needs of the target user of the documents. Understanding what the customer really needs and expects.
This smooth and reliable communication approach is the key of our success, and one of the reasons why hundreds of customers have been trusting us to handle their most complex and challenging documentation projects for more than twenty years now. Because they know they are working with experts that fully understand the meaning of all the documentation they handle.
We do not automate quality
There are also many service providers that, to save costs, rely on automated translation systems as their primary source of translated texts, and resort to human reviewers only for post-editing raw computer translations that would be entirely unacceptable as a final deliverable. This working method does not ensure quality, since fixing a defective raw translation may involve even more effort than translating from scratch, thus discouraging the most experienced professionals from accepting this kind of assignments. In the absence of qualified specialists willing to amend the flawed output from the automated translation systems, they ultimately outsource such a complex and sensitive work to poorly paid and underqualified reviewers lacking the skills needed to reliably handle highly specialized texts.
PARÁMETRO only uses Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tools to streamline some processes and lower costs for the customer when the documentation contains repetitive elements or earlier translations can be leveraged, but our original translations are always carried out by human experts from the beginning. While automated translation technologies have improved enough to render useful approximate translations of some simple contents in limited domains, as a matter of fact, only humans are still capable to fully understand the underlying context and grasp the enormous variety of nuances, exceptions, ambiguities and subtleties of the language used in agreements, technical or legal documents, where an alteration of the intended meaning could lead to multi-million losses, legal liabilities or reputational damages.
Do not entrust the future of your business to a machine.
Technical reliability
To properly render technical texts into another language, fluency in both the source and target languages is a prerequisite, but does not suffice: the translator must be able to abstract the syntactic and morphological structures that are specific to each language and focus the mind on the deep meaning of the text, so as to clearly and accurately convey it into the target language, preserving the intention and nuances of the source words, but expressing them like if the text would have been directly written in the target language.
This requires, in addition to a perfect command of the languages involved, a deep understanding of the concepts used in the documents. And this is why all the members of our team are engineers and technicians with a special flair for language and writing, that adds to their expertise in the associated technology field and proven experience in the industry.
Speed
Our customers often work under extreme time constraints. For instance, the time usually granted to prepare the response to a big tender process tends to be rather short. In cases where help from foreign specialists needs to be called to write the response documents, the company will first need to translate the tender documentation into their language, and then back-translate their responses to the customer’s source language, with very few days to complete the whole process. The longer it takes to translate the tender documentation and back-translate the responses, the shorter the effective time available for the specialists to prepare their replies will be, which could lead, in the best case, to a poor and haphazard response, and, in the worst, to missing the deadline, with catastrophic consequences for the business.
Price
We have optimized our structure to achieve the highest productivity levels at the lowest possible cost. This approach enables us to undertake the most complex projects at a price tag well below the average in the industry, with no compromise on quality, as we pass on to our customers all the savings stemming from a streamlined and agile organization avoiding unnecessary costs and optimizing time and resources.
Our cost-efficiency is the result of using:
- Professionals with many years of experience, and thus much higher productivity
- Custom-developed software tools to automate repetitive tasks
- Internal processes rationalized to minimize lead times
- Simplified and automated administrative procedures
- The best software tools for the translator
- Internal communication paths and work flows optimized to shorten wait times and remove superfluous or unnecessary tasks
We save costs in structure, but we do not cut corners when it comes to quality, since we only work with professionals with many years of experience and proven tools and processes.
Availability
Setbacks or changes in circumstances may alter the course of a project and lead to delays that could become irreparable if they are not immediately dealt with. For that reason, in every project, we keep an always-on hotline for our customers with permanent availability, even on holidays and week-ends, to immediately take care of any trouble or concern that may arise as the project develops. Every enquiry or request from our customers is personally answered in minutes, not hours or days, and by expert interlocutors, not by intermediaries.
We have been delivering language services to the leading companies in each industry for years. Our experience, combined with the quality and professionalism of our team, enables us to cater to any documentation project, regardless of its complexity or size, and ensure a smooth and agile process throughout all the stages of its execution.