Translation Case Studies
Case Study 1: Translation for Mobile Telephony
A major mobile telephone manufacturer required the translation of 4 million Japanese characters (JCs) of technical material translated in English within 3 weeks. Unfortunately the translation needed to be completed over the Christmas and New Year period. At 500 JCs to a page, this volume of translation is roughly equal to 8,000 pages of text.
Through the use of Elanex technology we were able to reduce the text volume by 63% to approximately 1.5 million characters to be translated.
Elanex used 28 translators/editors working in shifts over the 3 week period to complete the job before the required deadline.
Keys to success for this project were:
- Elanex technology reducing the text volume through matching by 63%
- Elanex technology extracting the text from a large number of Excel workbooks and providing it to the translators as MS Word files
- Elanex having access to sufficient professional translators able to handle this level of technical translation
- Elanex developed project management software allowing 28 translators/editors to work together to produce very high quality translation
- Translators and editors are not required to use any particular software as all the file conversion is performed by Elanex software, and the text for translation delivered to the translators in an open format. Consequently the pool of available translators is much larger
- Elanex’s commitment to providing cost high quality and cost effective solutions to clients’ most complicated translation requests.
Case Study 2: Reducing translation cost of technical manuals over time
Elanex has been working with a large Japanese hi-tech manufacturing company that needs to update a vast array of technical manuals on a semi-regular basis as upgrades are made to the hardware devices it exports to the US, Europe and other Asian countries.
Over a period of several years and translating manuals from Japanese to various languages, cumulative effect of Elanex technology has reduced the total text volume by over 60%. This was a reduction from a total of 3.8 million to 1.3 million words/Japanese characters.
As the translation Inventory (database of completed translations) grew, the text reductions and consequently the discounts gradually increased. New requests from other departments of the same company are also presently receiving significant text reductions and quality improvements through the use of the translation inventory and glossaries developed for the original department.
Keys to the success of this project were:
- Constantly maintained glossaries that allow correct use of terminology across all manuals creating much improved consistency
- All text extraction from and replacement back into original format is performed automatically and the reflow process retains the original formatting so only a minimal amount of layout/editing time is required
- Elanex has a large pool of professional technical translators and editors in all the major languages so multi-language translations can all be handled by the Elanex reducing administration time and costs
- Elanex’s commitment to providing cost high quality and cost effective solutions to clients’ most complicated translation requests