ISO responds, obviously, to the marketplace, and experts come together to create standards for the marketplace. Machine translation has been around for a considerable number of years, and post-editing is a reality. The industry now needs to structure itself in order to put best practices in place. That is what the post-editing standard is about.
It will help guide many companies or government organizations, legislatures perhaps, on how to best work with post-editing. An interesting part of the standard is that gisting was removed. Low-quality post-editing was also removed. Anything that would not render as high a quality as a professional translator would is not included in the standard.