They are two worldwide-known multinational companies in heating and air conditioning field
The problem
Carrier and Toshiba yearly produce a series of documents (catalogues, brochures, flyers, leaflets) illustrating the technical, aesthetical and commercial features of their products in heating and air conditioning field. These documents are designed, edited and graphically layed out at a centralized European level. Anyway there arises the need of sharing this information with all the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) area, allowing each local branch to access centrally-produced documents, to translate texts and generate localized versions. Moreover, since the phraseology used in writing documents is in the long run always the same, translators could consider convenient to preserve into a database all the previously translated sentences to reuse them in subsequent documents without any need of re-translation.
A classic approach and its troubles
The classic approach sets a graphic designer centrally in the job. He goes on collecting texts and images and lays out all the document manually. Once he's finished with the "master" (usually English) version, this one is sent to local branches for translation. As the translation is over too, all texts are sent back to the graphic designer, who manually replaces all along the pages of the document the English text with the local languages. This system wastes lots of working time and has plenty of disadvantages: a) it is always necessary to translate the document as a whole, since the previously translated documents cannot be reused because they were not saved into some centralized environment; b) the layout must be manually modified as the space occupied by a language is never the same occupied by the English text; c) during text replacement (with manual cutting-and-pasting made by the graphic designer) some interpretation error is always possible because the graphic designer cannot be acquainted with all the languages he's dealing with; d) a complete re-reading of texts is always needed, leading to numerous draft sessions between central site and local branches; e) use of non-standardized fonts may generate problems when switching from English to languages needing special characters (or even peculiar alphabets) such as Eastern Europe languages, greek or cyrillic.
Pragma 2000's solution: ELPS (EMEA Literature Publishing System)
ELPS Carrier-Toshiba
ELPS, the solution provided by Pragma 2000, is a system where the
document to be translated is first loaded by a single mouse click.
Then the document is analyzed and split into text "atoms", that are
saved into a database, shared with all local branches. ELPS recognizes
any previously translated text and immediately delivers the
translation into the local languages to local branches. Moreover, they
may access the system by a web interface and translate all the texts
the system was not able to detect by itself; this way, the centralized
database gets richer with more translated text atoms. Any new document
loaded into the system is automatically translated on average from 25
to 40% for all the managed languages (presently about a dozen).
ELPS Carrier-Toshiba
Once
the local branch has completed a translation, the system can be asked
to generate the final high resolution PDF. Thanks to its pagination
engine, ELPS replace English with local languages, without any
problems in using special characters (i.e. for Eastern Europe
languages) or non-latin alphabets (greek or cyrillic); managing of
arabic characters is presently being implemented. The system can
automatically adjust local languages in the same space occupied by
English, thanks to its sophisticated functions of text shrinking and
frame repositioning; these changes do not affect in any way the final
aesthetic of the document.
The results
Brochure Toshiba
ELPS automatic pagination final result is a high resolution PDF file
or a package including native Adobe InDesign files with their linked
images; both can be downloaded and sent directly to a printing house
(PDF) or manually refined at local level (native InDesign files). The
other valuable result is the enrichment of the centralized database of
phrases and words already translated in different languages, to be
used in subsequent publications. The system also offers a complete
workflow management. A document is followed in all steps: load,
revision of original English text by an English company specialized in
editing and communication, confirmation of final contents by Carrier
and Toshiba marketing department, control by Pragma 2000 of PDF
printing readiness, translation by local branches and, finally,
generation of translated pages.
Carrier and Toshiba yearly produce a series of documents (catalogues, brochures, flyers, leaflets) illustrating the technical, aesthetical and commercial features of their products in heating and air conditioning field. These documents are designed, edited and graphically layed out at a centralized European level. Anyway there arises the need of sharing this information with all the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) area, allowing each local branch to access centrally-produced documents, to translate texts and generate localized versions. Moreover, since the phraseology used in writing documents is in the long run always the same, translators could consider convenient to preserve into a database all the previously translated sentences to reuse them in subsequent documents without any need of re-translation.
A classic approach and its troubles
The classic approach sets a graphic designer centrally in the job. He goes on collecting texts and images and lays out all the document manually. Once he's finished with the "master" (usually English) version, this one is sent to local branches for translation. As the translation is over too, all texts are sent back to the graphic designer, who manually replaces all along the pages of the document the English text with the local languages. This system wastes lots of working time and has plenty of disadvantages: a) it is always necessary to translate the document as a whole, since the previously translated documents cannot be reused because they were not saved into some centralized environment; b) the layout must be manually modified as the space occupied by a language is never the same occupied by the English text; c) during text replacement (with manual cutting-and-pasting made by the graphic designer) some interpretation error is always possible because the graphic designer cannot be acquainted with all the languages he's dealing with; d) a complete re-reading of texts is always needed, leading to numerous draft sessions between central site and local branches; e) use of non-standardized fonts may generate problems when switching from English to languages needing special characters (or even peculiar alphabets) such as Eastern Europe languages, greek or cyrillic.
Pragma 2000's solution: ELPS (EMEA Literature Publishing System)
ELPS Carrier-Toshiba
ELPS Carrier-Toshiba
The results
Brochure Toshiba
Projects
Hardware, Heating and Plumbing catalogues
Europa 2000 Prontogros
- short text, often multilingual
- graphics of medium complexity with pictures of products
- intense usage of tables containg product information
- commercial data (prices) subject to frequent updates and often showing different currencies
Service requirements:
- precision
- reliability
- time reduction
- no more manual verification
Clients:
Emicon (FC) Europa 2000 Prontogros (RA) Holmec (RN) Sodifer (RN)