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Case study - 40,000 words translation of training material for Danish Crown

Background

Today all professional translation service providers use translation tools, such as Trados, that pair source and target texts at sentence level and store them in a database. This is a way to ensure consistency and quality in translations, as well as a way to systematize and rationalize the translation process.

An increasing number of companies with in-house translators use this technology. The benefits are the same as those obtained by the professional translation service providers, but proportionately less because of smaller translation volumes. Therefore it may be difficult to justify a large investment in translation tools - the payback time is simply too long to make it interesting.

Danish Crown has chosen Wordfast as a cost-friendly alternative to the programs that are primarily being used in the translation industry and in companies with large volumes of texts to be translated. Basically, Wordfast offers the same benefits as the other programs, and it marks a significant improvement from the widely used Word templates and homemade glossaries of terms and expressions.

Assignment

In the spring of 2005, Danish Crown needed a translation from Danish into German of a training material counting app. 40,000 words. With the given time frame, the translation assignment was too time-consuming for Danish Crown to do in-house. Consequently, Danish Crown decided to find a translation company that could do it for them.

In order to ensure that Danish Crown would be able to update the training material in the future, it was set down as a requirement that the translation be delivered in a Wordfast-compatible format.

The real challenge of the assignment was then not so much the translation itself, but rather to find a translation service provider who would - and could - deliver the translation in the required format.

Solution

Alfa & Omega A/S translated the training material using Trados, which is one of the most widely used tools in the translation industry. In this way, all translators and proof-readers worked on the same platform, in a familiar environment. In other words, they could focus on the assignment itself - the translation.

In a parallel process, Alfa & Omega A/S prepared the last-step conversion of the Trados databases with the translations to Wordfast format. The assignment was finished on time and delivered in the required format - and it worked!

Conclusion

Danish Crown could add 40,000 new words in sentence pairs to their Wordfast database - in exactly the same way as if Danish Crown had done the translation of the training material in-house.

Now Danish Crown can update the training material in-house, and in case of major changes ask Alfa & Omega A/S to do the translations - without having to start all over. Costs in terms of time and money can thus be reduced when the training material has to be updated in the future, and at the same time a consistent terminology and style of language can be maintained in the translations.

To sum up, Danish Crown has obtained many benefits from using translation tools - with a small investment. The handling of the specific assignment has boosted Danish Crown's use of Wordfast because the database - and thus the knowledge built up in-house - has grown significantly. At the same time, choosing Wordfast has not excluded the exchange of data with external translation companies - it only adds a few extra requirements that the professional translation service provider has to fulfil.

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