Multinational companies that export to many different countries might well spend millions of euros per year on documentation and localization. An adequate language and automation strategy helps to drastically reduce localization costs and speed up the documentation cycle. The Dutch company Océ shares its journey of improving content quality and translatability.
Some years ago, the multinational manufacturer of copying and printing equipment, Océ Technologies, faced a great challenge: how to improve documentation quality while reducing costs. Although the actual case described in this article dates back a few years, the motivations, principles, and choices are still valid.
The language factor
As our technical writers were mostly Dutch technicians creating the English source documents for user and technical service documentation, the quality of these source documents varied considerably both in style and grammar. Due to a lack of terminology management, documentation was also terminologically inconsistent. This in turn drove up localization costs. Part of the problem had been addressed by introducing a translation memory (TM) and rule-based machine translation (MT). A great deal of effort was also invested in a fully automated workflow, which ...
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