Translating 5,000+ AutoCAD drawings into Kazakh for a plant construction

Situation

For an industrial plant construction in Kazakhstan, an international contractor handed us the full design documentation package in English. Local requirements called for Kazakh, with part of the documentation also in Russian. The volume: over 5,000 technical drawings in AutoCAD and over 600 pages of technical manuals. The engagement ran for three years — from the first working-documentation packages to the final operation manuals.

Task

The hard part wasn’t the volume — it was the formatting requirements. The client supplied a bilingual layout specification in which every line of text had defined coordinates and font size — and they genuinely measured it: the position of every label on every sheet was checked against the spec. The translation couldn’t merely “fit”; it had to sit at an exact position on the drawing without touching the graphics.

How we worked

1. A glossary before the first sheet. From a pilot package we extracted every key term — assemblies, materials, title-block designations. Each term was verified against industry technical dictionaries and approved by the client’s engineers. That glossary was law for the whole team for three years.
2. A team in Trados with shared translation memory. A group of Kazakh and Russian technical translators worked with one shared TM, guaranteeing that the same note reads identically on sheet 14 and sheet 4,780. Translators aligned contested terms with each other, the editor, and the client in a shared terminology log.
3. Match analysis — honest pricing. Drawings are full of repetition: title blocks, standard notes, serial labels. Before each package we ran a Trados match count, and the client didn’t pay full rate for repeats. Across 5,000 sheets that saved a substantial share of the budget.
4. Layout to coordinates. After translation, every sheet went through engineering DTP in AutoCAD: lines placed at the specified coordinates and font size, bilingual blocks arranged per the client’s spec. Not a single label drifting over the graphics.
5. Quality control: editor + Xbench. A dedicated editor proofread every package, and automated Xbench checks caught what human eyes miss across thousands of sheets: inconsistent translations of identical lines, number and designation errors, untranslated fragments.

Result

Over three years the client received the complete documentation set in Kazakh and Russian: drawings that passed formatting inspection on the first attempt, and manuals engineers now use in live production. The glossary and translation memory remain project assets — every subsequent package cost less and shipped faster than the one before.

Worth knowing

• Drawing translation is always technical translation plus engineering DTP: without working directly in AutoCAD, the result has to be rebuilt by hand.
• Bilingual formatting is a standard requirement on international construction projects — agree the layout spec before translation starts.
• Kazakh is a rare language at this technical volume: check that your vendor has specialist translators, not just “a language on the list.”
• A smaller project in the same discipline: technical drawings for a sugar plant.