Introduction
Compromised quality can come with serious consequences in the manufacturing industry. Here’s how one multinational company pulled off compliance in six languages and ended up saving money.
With 60,000 employees worldwide, this Fortune 500 company was a leading machinery manufacturer for agricultural and construction equipment. To continue to expand its reach and cement its place in the industry, the client needed to translate its critical documentation and materials, helping to achieve its status as a major player in the global arena.
The scope of the manufacturing translation services project included converting technical manuals, supplier and distributor bulletins and marketing collateral into six languages, including: Dutch, Spanish, Polish, Italian and Swedish.
The Challenge
Manufacturing comes with strict controls and quality practices that must be followed. In this case, the company was required to use a third-party vendor to validate the translated documents. The process of recruiting and instituting a third-party auditor for each project proved costly and time restrictive.
All of the translations had to adhere to the SAE J2450 quality standard, which outlines specific rules for terminology, grammar, syntax, word structure and spelling. To meet these guidelines and ensure compliance, the manufacturer needed a language partner with the capability to create a workflow that would allow them to communicate with the third-party review team, implement subsequent edits and finalize the materials in a seamless process.
The Solution
The company approached Propio to complete the translations and implement a review process that integrated the SAE J2450 metric. Propio modified its existing Language Quality Assessment (LQA) templates and workflow to account for revisions made necessary by the standard, working with the company’s third-party reviewer to facilitate the process.
A Propio project manager acted as the single point of contact between linguists and the third-party reviewer, creating a centralized communication system that allowed for feedback and changes to be made in a streamlined fashion.
Over the course of several months, Propio integrated this review process into its translation workflow and completed more than 250 translation projects for the company.
Proven Results
As a result of Propio’s MT system, the newspaper successfully began publishing a Catalan edition along with its Spanish paper, leading to increased readership and ultimately more revenue for the publication.
The first edition of the Catalan paper was published on the newspaper’s 130th anniversary, and the translated edition helped the publication drastically strengthen its market position in Spain.
The newspaper saw a four percent rise in the number of paper copies sold and increased its readership by seven percent after the translation project was completed. This increase represents a bump in revenue that most papers don’t see in the digital age.
Propio leveraged its state-of-the-art MT system and advanced post-editing skills to create accurate and cost-efficient translations for the newspaper while making sure both daily editions were sent out on time.
