Drilling down to the essentials in China

Product localization case study

Challenge

As the largest supplier of MWD (measurement while drilling) downhole technology for sale to the global oil and gas industry, Geolink – a Sondex plc company, prides itself on its strong international focus.

To supply a company in Mainland China the company required highly technical documentation – 10 manuals in all, some 200,000 words – to be accurately translated from English into Simplified Chinese.

It was essential that the translator team had specialist knowledge of the drilling sector as well as being fully conversant with the local linguistic and cultural conventions. www.geolink.co.uk

Approach and solution

Following a rigorous selection procedure by Geolink, Lloyd International was selected for the project. Lloyd International in turn appointed a single language vendor company in China specialising in English-Chinese translation, and with access to in-house DTP resources.

The manuals were written in Adobe PageMaker, Adobe FrameMaker and Microsoft Word. Throughout the project Lloyd International used the latest translation tools and processes, including:
• Glossary management (agreement of key words and preferred terms), to ensure accuracy and consistency
• Translation Memory, to maximise quality and reduce the lead time and cost of the translation
• Developing glossaries to ensure that the client’s preferred terminology is used
• Rigorous project management, supported by a networked job tracking system which enabled every stage of the work to be handled transparently and monitored by the client via a secure gateway

Results and benefits

With the help of Lloyd International, Geolink’s business in China has continued to expand.

“Whilst it is too early to quantify the benefits of having our technical documentation translated into Simplified Chinese, feedback from existing customers has been very positive; in addition, our sales team dealing with Chinese-speaking nations has had favourable comments from prospective customers. The project has notbeen without its share of difficulties but the lessons learned will be invaluable when the time comes to either update the existing publications or have new documentation translated.” Graham Miller - Training Co-Ordinator, Geolink.