Technical Manual Translations – Project Brief:

Argos Multilingual regularly completes technical translation projects for engineering and construction companies in need of adapting their instruction manuals into multiple languages. Engineering equipment is especially prone to being used by people around the world who need to understand all of the instructions in order for the devices to work properly. That’s the reason why engineering companies regularly commission Argos to complete English to Polish translations (along with review, QA and DTP work on the final clean files) of their instructions manuals.

Recently Argos completed such instruction manual translation for a smelting line upgrade. Because of the project scope (over 140 pages of content), our client delivered initial files for translation in parts during the course of two months. Most of the text was in word and excel format, along with some AutoCad drawings and supporting files in PDF format. Argos collected all the files and in using specialized CAT tools managed to streamline all the data into a single, consistent and easy to use/re-use file format.

Argos’ localization department worked on preparing ttx files for translation out of the Word documents, Excel and PDF files using OCR. Our localization team took out all the text from the graphics files and imposed them into ttx files.

Then, our DTP department took over the work of rearranging all the files and their content (text and images) laying them out into an appropriate, source based template. Some of the PDF files turned out to be more problematic than others as their source quality was mediocre, they were protected by passwords that the client had lost and some contained watermarks. Regardless of all these problems, our DTP specialists dealt with all these issues and succeeded in completing all the work on time and to our client’s full satisfaction.

Background Information:

1. Client Industry: Engineering, construction and power equipment
2. Type of Product: Instructions manual
3. Type of Project: Translation, review, QA, and DTP
4. Languages involved: English into Polish
5. Amount of work: almost 30,000 words
6. Time frame: 3 weeks