Medical device company launches global rebranding initiative

The company wanted to standardize all product documentation and associated translated materials from its business units and acquired companies. Using their current document authoring system, the ultimate goal was to:

• Expand document translation to support 18 languages
• Author all documents in the same software platform and application [Adobe® InDesign® (PC version)] to achieve consistency in design and layout
• Deliver all new documents on time to prevent any disruption to the global sales and distribution of their products

After assessing their options, the company chose ULG to provide medical device translation services and desktop publishing for this initiative.

ULG worked closely with the client to coordinate the scope and complexity of the file management, translations, desktop publishing, and final file delivery components of each project. Altogether the project involved the fastidious management of more than 5,000 files and translations. The initiative required ULG to do the following:

• Convert documents from Adobe® FrameMaker® (PC), QuarkXPress® and Adobe® PageMaker® (MAC) to Adobe® InDesign® (PC). This included challenging languages with font incompatibilities, such as Greek and Japanese
• Provide converted documents back to the client for making necessary updates to the English source text
• Take updated English source text documents back from the client and prepare files for updating the translations of 10 existing languages and seven new languages. The translation languages included: English into Chinese-Simplified, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese Europe, Spanish-Europe, Swedish and Turkish
• As needed, build and validate glossaries for new terminology and languages
• Format completed translations to match the client-specified layout and design criteria
• Run the translated and formatted documents through a quality check to verify compliance with the client’s master brand requirements
• Deliver all documents back to the client in print-ready format

Despite the magnitude of this initiative, each of the client’s translation projects was processed with the highest level of quality and efficiency thanks to ULG’s technologies and experience with international standards of safety and security.

This provided the client with the confidence needed to submit projects to ULG’s assigned project manager and simply wait for final file delivery, with little or no additional involvement. Below is a summary of other resources used:

• Translation memories − Consisting of text segments (blocks, paragraphs, sentences and phrases) in a source language and their translations into one or more target languages. Client-specific memories were shared with linguists and maintained and updated by ULG.
• Qualified linguists – Linguists who were qualified on the basis of education/ certification, experience, area of expertise,
• Client glossary – In addition to the translation memories ULG assisted with the building and validation of glossaries for key terminology in all of the required languages. These glossaries were referenced by the linguists to maintain consistency.
• Octave – ULG’s Web-based workflow management system enabled our project teams to schedule, resource, manage and deliver projects on time, with efficiency and to the client’s expectations.