Machine Translation and Expert Review in Collaboration with a Technical Editor at Carstens + Partner

During the development phase and in international collaboration with other companies, English is the preferred language of communication. However, as the product approaches the market launch phase, German regulations and certification bodies require that all technical documentation be provided in the local language.

As the system neared completion, the suppliers of individual components provided the corresponding assembly and maintenance instructions in PDF format, in English. However, these documents presented an inconsistent overall picture and had to be translated and technically approved by the client on their own responsibility.

For this project, the highest priorities were time and the prior content review of the instructions and technical terminology by us as their reliable partner, in order to accelerate approval by the development team for internal stakeholders.

Although the primary goal of the project was the translation of the technical documentation, C+P placed its focus on the technical approval by an in-house bilingual technical editor with extensive expertise in the field. His knowledge enabled us to apply machine translation while maintaining high quality standards and to consolidate several process steps.

We were able to reduce translation times through the combined use of machine translation and a translation memory system. While we used machine translation for new texts, the translation memory allowed us to overwrite redundant documents with previously approved translations and mark these texts as reviewed. To support quality assurance, we developed custom validation routines in a dedicated tool specifically for this project.

We accelerated the completion of the documentation by consolidating several work steps and focusing on cleaning the source files and source texts. Thanks to his bilingual skills, our editor reviewed the English text within the newly created layout for content accuracy, thereby improving the consistency of the source texts. In close coordination with the client, he defined the technical terms and their translations. These terms were incorporated into a glossary, integrated into the translation memory, and considered during the quality assurance of the machine translation by both the post-editor and the translation project manager.

The linguistic approval of the German translation by the editor was carried out using a bilingual revision file, which allowed all corrections to be automatically transferred into the translation memory. The translation memory ensured that all formatting from the source file was preserved in the target file. This significantly simplified the final layout process.

All subsequent corrections made by the editor and the change requests from the client’s product managers were incorporated into the glossary. By the end of the project, the glossary contained over 3,500 technical terms and preferred phrasings for future use. Notably, the amount of post-editing required steadily decreased over the course of the project deliveries.

This allowed the project to be completed on time and in the high quality expected by the client.