Challenge
A global leader in industrial cutting technologies has sold its products worldwide for over 50 years and must communicate with its broad customer base with laser precision in more than 93 countries.
To ensure the proper use of its innovative cutting tools and software, the company develops highly technical product manuals and marketing materials that need to be translated and formatted into 30+ languages. Our client had embarked on a massive translation project of over 40 product manuals of 500 pages each. Managing the process was cumbersome, frustrating, and resulted in poor translation quality, inconsistent terminology across manuals, and multiple formatting issues.
Solution
The company required an expert partner to provide a complete and efficient solution. Protranslating established a dedicated team and customized workflow to address project management, translation, formatting, and in-country review steps, taking care of the process end-to-end. The linguistic team, comprised of manufacturing and engineering subject matter experts, cleaned up our client’s Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) memories and worked with in-country reviewers to establish a glossary and style guide—an essential step in ensuring consistency across manuals. For every language, Protranslating assigned a senior editor, working directly with each in-country review team to discuss terminology and translation feedback. Additionally, heavy involvement from the studio team and localization engineers ensured non-translatable elements, such as pictures and graphics, were isolated to ensure consistency in the finished files.
Result
Efficiencies gained through the proper use of CAT tools and memory management have resulted in 50% cost savings for the company. Moreover, key client representatives are in control of the process at every step through the use of Protranslating’s complementary technology. The team can submit files and keep track of the status of each job using our translation portal. In-country reviewers can also log in to the review portal to give real-time feedback, assuring quality localized manuals that the company can distribute with confidence to its customers. Our involvement enabled the company to exercise its leadership role beyond the development of leading-edge technologies and into the ownership of written materials that effectively represent the company worldwide.
