Airbus Helicopters, the world’s leading helicopter manufacturer, currently has 12,000 aircraft operated by more than 3,000 customers in about 150 countries. Airbus Helicopters has a strong international presence with subsidiaries and affiliates in 24 countries and a worldwide network of maintenance centers, training centers, distributors and authorized agents.
What was the initial challenge?
Following its global aircraft sales expansion, Airbus asked Your Word Store to produce and update all its documentation in the Russian target language:
- Translation of technical documentation: Maintenance and Repair Manuals, Flight Manuals, creation of glossaries, Service Bulletins, etc.
- Translation of educational documentation: training materials, e-learning, emulators, simulators, educational software, videos, etc.
What was the solution provided by Your Word Store?
To carry out this large-scale project, Your Word Store brought together a project team tailored to the needs and adjusted over time (ramp up), comprising all the multidisciplinary profiles required to perform the tasks properly and demonstrating proven experience in the target scope of activity:
- Project Managers
- Professional Translators
- Revisers/Proofreaders
- Various business support specialists including DTP Operators, Multimedia Graphic Designers, Engineering Drafters.
Focus on the project workflow
1. As mentioned, the first step critical to the success of such a task is building a project team (back and front office) adapted to needs and made up of highly qualified members who have the necessary linguistic, stylistic and technical skills to bring this terminologically challenging customer project to a successful conclusion. This is the role of Your Word Store linguistic project managers: they are tasked with allocating the best resources to the project and coordinating all the specialists involved in the process. To do so, they selected the best Russian-speaking translators specialized in aeronautical technical translation, using specific and timed linguistic tests. Given the stakes of this project and the volumes involved, the initial project team was built in 3 months.
2. The selected translators then start to produce the project and communicate with the dedicated Project Managers to ensure that the project specifications were met and that any terminological or technical issues were solved. The translator must check that translation is accurate, that syntax, spelling and punctuation are correct and that any other spelling rules are met. Finally, the translator revises their own work and makes the necessary changes.
3. Revisers/Proofreaders: revision services are provided for all translation tasks carried out by Your Word Store: our professional translators and linguists revise translations in accordance with best practices (ISO 17100:2015). The cross-review stage ensures that terminology is consistent throughout the translation project, that specialized glossaries required for the project are used, that document requirements are met (tags, styles, structure, CAT) and that translations are optimally stored in translation memories.
The reviser has the same skills as a translator and therefore has a postgraduate diploma in translation.
The reviser either corrects the errors found or recommends corrections to be made by the translator.
The reviser notifies the Project Manager of any corrective action taken.
4. The “Business Support” specialists, i.e. DTP operators, graphic designers, drafters, etc., also play a key role, as they make specific incoming data (images, Adobe files, etc.) usable for translation. They are in charge of the graphic and computing design and layout of the customer materials.
All these complementary internal expertise areas allow us to ensure final proofreading of deliverables, thus adding value to customer deliverables (if necessary and after customer approval).
Outcome
“We have been working with Your Word Store for the past 10 years, particularly on projects involving the translation of our technical and educational documentation. We are extremely satisfied with this collaboration, which has quickly become a true partnership between our two companies. Indeed, there are several reasons why we have absolute confidence in Your Word Store’s language services: outstanding quality of the deliverables, timeliness, responsiveness in handling our requests, provision of a dedicated contact for each project, and thorough knowledge of CAT and DTP tools. Your Word Store also did very professional work on a terminology management project for our new helicopter range. Finally, the expertise of their translators sometimes allowed us to correct a few errors in our English document collection.
As a conclusion, I highly recommend Your Word Store, which has always been able to provide real added value to our linguistic needs and showed full ability to handle often large and complex technical documents. Thank you to their entire team! ”
Pascal C. - Airbus Helicopters Translation Manager