Large Technical Manual Update into 7 Languages

Client background
Our client is a leading manufacturer of biomedical testing instruments and testing supplies that simplify and automate laboratory processes. More than 200,000 of our client’s systems operate in laboratories around the world, supplying critical information for improving patient health and reducing health care costs.

Project background
Our client needed to update a major equipment user manual created in Adobe FrameMaker into 7 European Languages with a demanding delivery schedule. Since there were significant updates scattered throughout the documents, there was no easy workaround to only extract the translated content for translation. Most localization vendors would have just leveraged the updated FrameMaker files with existing translation memories (TMs) to process everything from scratch. However, using this approach would result in extra cost because fuzzy matches would need to be reviewed in addition to translating the new content. The same approach would also require full DTP to be performed to the entire localized manuals. In order to save both project cost and turnaround time, our client selected CSOFT for this demanding task because of our large engineering and DTP capabilities.

Challenges
Unlike a regular user manual localization project that would first require our team to convert FrameMaker files into MIFs and then leverage existing project TMs to create the translation kits, our engineering team first had to compare the two sets of FrameMaker files to identify all the changed content. Next, the team had to manually extract these changed contents before leveraging them against project TMs. Doing so required a lot of engineering work as well additional QA to ensure all changed content had been captured correctly. Once translations were completed, our DTP team had to manually place these changed contents back into previously localized manuals. Our language teams then needed to perform post layout linguistic review (or PLLP) to ensure all changes had been properly implemented.

The CSOFT Solution
Because CSOFT offers highly competitive engineering and multilingual DTP services in 70+ languages by taking advantage of our expert production capabilities in China, using the comparison approach actually helped the client save cost by avoiding the extra, and more expensive, work needed at the translation phase. However, using this approach also required many more hours of file preparation and manual copy/paste which was a challenge to the project team because of the tight project deadline. To meet this challenge, our project team in China created a two shift production plan so that the engineering and DTP members worked in unison with our European based translators. All linguistic comments were implemented quickly and any queries were resolved instantly without loss of time. Many of the production members also worked overtime and during weekends to ensure prompt delivery of each project component. In the end, we were able to complete localization of the user manual in all 7 languages with quality and cost efficiency.

The Result
Our client was able to release the localized product manuals to their customers in each of the 7 target counties on time and within budget.

For more information about this case study, please send an inquiry to info@medl10n.com.