Introduction
A global Life Sciences company was bogged down by its human translation process. By using a flexible, AI-driven language platform, new levels of productivity and financial return became possible.
This multinational Life Sciences corporation needed billing statements translated into English from Korean, Chinese and Japanese. With offices located around the world, the company recognized its current workflow had areas of opportunity for improvement. The process in place funneled all translation work to an internal team of multilingual employees in China. This system proved inefficient and put undue pressure on the Chinese staff.
The final phase of the company’s translation workflow entailed the billing documents being sent to the Philippines after being converted into English. All of these components needed to be streamlined under the company’s limited budget, and in an environment that had rigid turnaround times.
The Challenge
Identifying the weak points in the workflow and overcoming key obstacles was critical to finding the right solution.
The company’s existing protocol, which had Chinese employees translating billing statements on top of their daily workloads, more than doubled the processing time of the documents and resulted in overworked and frustrated staff with missed deadlines.
In addition, the division had no approved budget for translation. Propio estimated the company was spending $1.3 million annually on human translation when utilizing the Chinese staff to translate its financial documents. This system was one the company could not sustain.
This manual translation process proved expensive and inefficient, and depleted internal resources. Transforming the translation workflow that tackled the challenges of cost and efficiency required a unique, robust language solution.
The Solution
By integrating MT into its workflow, the company experienced a dramatic decrease in spending. The cost for translations in the first year was less than $200,000, and then under $115,000 the following year. Over the first two years of implementation, these equated to a 90 percent cost reduction.
Not only was the company able to save drastic amounts of money using Propio’s MT solution, it also dramatically lightened the workload of its Chinese staff members, increasing worker morale and productivity.
In addition, MT’s ability to retain a document’s original formatting meant no work was required on the client side. In the end, the company was able to successfully translate the necessary financial documents in English and send them to their destination in the Philippines without cost or turnaround time issues thanks to Propio’s Machine Translation solution.
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.
