Issue

Student Solution

Join in a
discussion
of this case.

This is a case study in international technical communication.

Desperately Seeking Tools

This US-based medical company manufactures cardiac pacemakers and as a result must have its products and accompanying documentation approved by Federal Drug Administration (FDA) before the products can be sold in the US. This process can take up to two years. To remain profitable, the company has been selling its products in other parts of the world. Because of the nature of its product, no matter where the company exports the product, it is still affected by heavy regulations at national and international levels.

The Technical Communication department, based in the US, writes the documentation (both printed and on-line) in English. However, because of the international strategy of the company, the Technical Communication Department must have translations done before the English version is approved by the FDA. This means that the target versions of their information products are one-to-two years ahead of the source language version! In fact, the department typically starts the translation process long before the English is solid in order to reduce any gap between the English being "frozen" and the other languages being available.

To complicate matters, the company has families of products in both a premium and a standard line. They also have more than one brand in both the premium and standard line. Each family can have up to 12 models. The Technical Communication department manages documentation for up to 48 models (and thus manuals) in each family generation. The department of ten works on at least two and sometimes three generations simultaneously. Much of the material is the same across different manuals, whether it be for premium or standard lines, different brands, different models within a family or within a different generation.

The Technical Communication department coordinates the translation into French, Italian, German, and Spanish (FIGS); Japanese; Dutch; Swedish; Danish; and Chinese. The number of target languages is expected to grow to 12-15 in the next couple of years. The translation is done by an in-house translation group in The Netherlands and at least two other translation firms in different parts of the world. Translation costs are high.

Issue

The Technical Communication department is considering a tools strategy to help them take advantage of previous translations, speed up the translation process, and reduce translation costs. They are currently evaluating two possible strategies: database publishing with SGML, and translation memory technology (software that uses fuzzy logic to compare previous translations to the current translation-in-progress, find redundancies, and re-use the previous translations in the current work).

Weigh the pros and cons of both strategies and consider whether there are others that the manager should consider. Consider the impact of time; the impact of this technology on the company's translation vendors, some of whom are small firms; types of expenses migrating to such strategies incurs; and how this migration affects both the documentation and translation development cycles.

Desperately Seeking Tools

Issue

Student Solution to Case 3

Join in a discussion of this case.