An equipment manufacturer's documentation: a project of tens of thousands of words

Situation

An international equipment manufacturer was entering the Ukrainian market together with a local distributor. The launch required a complete set of Ukrainian materials: product catalogs, technical descriptions, manuals — tens of thousands of words in total.

Task

Translate a large body of technical documentation with uniform terminology across all materials, preserved formatting, and a delivery schedule that wouldn’t delay the sales launch.

How we did it

1. A glossary before translation. We extracted the key terms — component names, specifications, units. Every term was verified against industry technical dictionaries, and the Ukrainian equivalents were agreed with the distributor’s technical specialists.
2. A team in Trados with shared translation memory. A group of technical translators worked the corpus: the shared TM guaranteed identical phrasing across all documents, and contested terms were aligned between translators, the editor, and the client in a terminology log.
3. Match analysis before quoting. Technical documentation is full of repetition — standard specifications, serial descriptions. Matches and repeats weren’t billed at full rate, and the full project carried a volume discount on top.
4. Phased delivery. Materials shipped in batches by the client’s priority: launch-critical content first, the rest of the catalog after.
5. Quality control: editor + Xbench. The editor proofread every batch against the glossary, while Xbench automatically cross-checked numbers, units, and the consistency of identical strings across files.
6. DTP. A desktop-publishing specialist set the translation back into the catalog layouts: tables, diagrams, and figure captions in place — structure and graphics one-to-one with the original.

Result

The distributor had the complete Ukrainian materials in hand for launch. Catalog updates are now translated under the same glossary — faster and cheaper than the first cycle.

Worth knowing

• The costliest error in technical translation is inconsistent terminology: the same part named differently in the catalog and the manual confuses customers and service engineers alike.
• The glossary and translation memory are the client’s assets: they stay with you and make every future document cheaper.
• Large projects reward early planning: phased delivery lets sales start without waiting for the full translation to finish.
• Our largest project in this discipline: 5,000+ AutoCAD drawings into Kazakh for a plant construction.