[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 an inquiry from the person in charge of the instruction manuals at a medical device 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 Megumi

・As a machine translation consultant, I provide consulting for the introduction of machine translation and process development for Japanese companies.
・I emphasize the importance of source text quality, which affects multilingual translation, and also conduct consulting for manual creation suitable for machine translation in the Japanese writing process.
・I am also responsible for the following presentations related to machine translation.
– 2013, 23rd JTF (Japan Translation Federation) Translation Festival
"Approaches to Machine Translation in Multilingual Contexts
– From the Perspective of Evaluation and Process" Lecture
– 2014, AAMT (Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation) Machine Translation Fair
"Mastering Machine Translation – For Quality and Productivity Improvement"