At your service - with best marks

It had been sort of a long-standing plan of our founder's to upgrade his qualifications and become a certified translator, not least because our corporate clients should not have to trust our promise of highest quality standards implicitly, but rather have concrete proof of the quality we provide both as far as concerns our training and translation services. So much the better, then, to know that our company, represented by our founder, came in as one of the best IHK examinees of 2018! Obviously, we will not allow our founder to brag about his performance in the exam, but we will reveal that his certificate is adorned with altogether seven "ones/As" and just two "twos/Bs". Read more about the particularity of the IHK's diploma in translation in the following section.

Why the IHK diploma in translation?

When our founder researched into which exam to take, he found that many international diplomas such as the DipTrans, offered by the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) in the UK, only ask examinees to translate from the target language into their native tongue, in the case of our founder this would have meant from English into German. The IHK exam, however, provides candidates with a far greater challenge in that it includes both written and oral translations not only from the target language into the examinees' L1 (mother tongue), but also the opposite direction, i.e. translations from L1 into the target language. In more concrete terms, here's what the IHK exam for translators consists of:

1. Written translation of two difficult (business-related or legal) texts from L1 (German) into the target language (L2=English)
2. Written translation of two difficult (business-related or legal) texts from L2 (English) into the L1 (German)
3. Essay (L2) on a business topic (about 700 words)
4. Oral translation of a difficult (business-related or legal) text from L1 (German) into the target language (L2=English)
5. Oral translation of a difficult (business-related or legal) text from L2 (English) into the L1 (German)
6. Discussion of a topic chosen/suggested by the examiners

In the case of our founder, the examiners were apparently pleased enough with his performance to allow him to talk about just any topic he liked. Guess what he chose - the [SIC] method and approach to teaching English, of course!