[Case Study: 15% Reduction in Translation Costs] Medical Device User Manual

When it comes to machine translation, you may have the image of "cheap and bad", but that is a thing of the past.

With the development of machine translation technology, it is now possible to reduce translation costs while maintaining the same level of quality as human translation by building an optimal process tailored to the translation target.

We received a consultation from a person in charge of handling instructions at a medical equipment manufacturer in the Tokai region at the end of 2013.

We handle the translation of approximately 1.1 million words per year from English to multiple languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese) for instruction manuals.

• ・Want to reduce translation costs
• ・I want to shorten the time it takes to release the instruction manual.

We received an inquiry stating "We want to consider implementing machine translation."
However, they also had a request that "We do not want to compromise translation quality."
Therefore, from Human Science Co., Ltd., we proposed the following two points for implementing machine translation.

① Pre-implementation quality evaluation (comparison of quality using two engines)

Calculated the comparison of translation quality and cost reduction rate with two candidate statistical-based engines.
Proposed an engine with high quality and expected cost reduction, and the client has decided to adopt the engine.

Proposed review process by native translators

Machine Translation Process + Post-edit In addition to the usual process of
machine translation and post-editing,
we achieve a translation quality that is "accurate and easy to understand" by conducting reviews by translators.

Evaluation of the quality of trial translations conducted in processes ① and ② by local branches in each of our customers' countries.
We received evaluations of "no quality issues" in all languages.
As a result, machine translation was implemented in actual translation projects in 2014.

Successfully reduced translation costs from English to multiple languages by 15%.

As of 2015, the translation of instruction manuals has been on track,
and we are currently conducting trials for machine translation of service manuals that require quick translation.

As shown in the case introduced today, it is possible to achieve both quality maintenance and cost reduction through the introduction of machine translation.

Please feel free to contact us.

 

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Blog Writing Team

Tokuda Ai

・As a machine translation consultant, I provide consulting services for Japanese companies on machine translation implementation and process building.
・I place importance on the quality of the source text, which affects multilingual translation, and also provide consulting services for manual creation suitable for machine translation in the Japanese writing process.
・I also give presentations on the following topics related to machine translation.
- Presentation at the 23rd JTF (Japan Translation Federation) Translation Festival in 2013
"Approaches to Machine Translation in Multilingual Environments
- From the Perspectives of Evaluation and Process"
- Presentation at the 2014 AAMT (Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation) Machine Translation Fair
"Mastering Machine Translation - Improving Quality and Productivity"