How technology accelerates time to market
& drives down translation costs

Technology case study

Challenge

Over the years, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of construction equipment and client of Lloyd International Translations (LIT), had developed streamlined and efficient authoring processes. Their in-house procedures incorporated standardised file management and file naming across the whole Technical Publications department, from operator handbooks and service manuals, to online help and training materials.

Their authors rarely wrote new instruction manuals from scratch, choosing to re-use existing manuals as the basis for new manuals. This approach of controlled source text reduced the authoring task and improved consistency.

Translating into some 30 languages, they were already realising the benefits of using a Context TM (a Trados Translation Memory tool) approach to translation, being applied by LIT to all of their technical publication updates (revisions of their existing manuals).

A Context TM approach translates new revisions against older bilingual versions (of the same document), transferring translations in context from the old documents into the new. Updated translations are created in such a way that unchanged 100% matches are protected against editing and can be skipped by the translator. All that remains to translate is new or changed text.

Adopting a Context TM approach to translation projects eliminates the requirement to review in-context 100% matches, thus helping organisations to cost-effectively manage the growing volumes of information required to compete in their multilingual world market.

Continually striving for improvement to systems, procedures and services, LIT recognised the benefits to be gained through the use of SDL WorldServer™ - to further enhance their existing portfolio of TM technology tools.

WorldServer™ combines sophisticated and centralised Translation Memory (TM), workflow and linguistic asset management technologies to automate translation and localization processes. It simplifies and accelerates localization processes for any content – from document to software to websites.

Approach and solution

With WorldServer™ embedded into its suite of technology tools it was time to explore the added benefits LIT could now offer their client, by way of improved project timeliness, quality and cost.

A number of WorldServer™ features result in cost and time savings for LIT’s client:
• Powerful matching features eliminate the costly review effort typically required to preserve quality within the unchanged portions of previously translated content.
• The option to integrate existing content repositories (translation memory databases that had been created with past localization projects) at the outset, allows their client to immediately leverage maximum TM benefits.
• The ability to analyse new translation projects against multiple existing TM sources delivers optimum TM savings.
• Automated steps in the translation process eliminate activities that do not require human interaction. As a result the entire Service translation and localization process has been accelerated, enabling gains in productivity and resource savings.

Results and benefits

By automating many time-consuming and costly functions, LIT was able to further improve translation quality, reduce turnaround times and drive down costs.

The processing of translation projects using WorldServer™ automates many functions, leading to considerable additional time and cost savings for clients. In this case, the cost per word (for a translation and independent proof-reading service), over a twelve month period (on some target languages) was cut by up to 73%. A significant cost saving for our client, whose price per word, on some core European target languages, was driven down to as little as £0.04 per word.