Five markets, one source of truth: technical manual localization for an automotive OEM

The client

A European Tier-1 automotive component manufacturer was preparing the global launch of a new electric drivetrain platform. The technical service manual — 82,000 words, dense with engineering schematics, part numbers, and procedural instructions — needed to ship simultaneously in five Central European market languages.

The challenge

Source files arrived in two formats and two languages. The German engineering team authored in DOCX with extensive cross-references; the English-language version had been translated externally six months earlier and contained terminology drift the German team hadn’t been aware of. The client’s existing translation memory was fragmented across three different vendors and two CAT tool ecosystems.

The deadline was firm: six weeks to delivery, no extension possible.

The approach

Week 1 — terminology reconciliation. Before any translation began, I extracted candidate terminology from both source versions and cross-referenced it against the client’s existing TMs. I delivered a normalized glossary of 1,840 terms with flagged discrepancies — including 14 cases where the English translation had introduced ambiguity not present in the German source. The client’s engineering lead signed off the corrected glossary in two working days.

Week 2–4 — translation. Czech and Slovak were mine, end-to-end. Polish and Hungarian were sourced from two senior linguists in my network, briefed with the same glossary and style guide, and integrated into a shared memoQ project for live cross-leverage. Daily standup with the German engineering team for source-side clarifications.

Week 5 — QA. Two-pass QA per language: first pass linguistic (terminology, register, locale conventions); second pass technical (tags, cross-reference integrity, page numbering, schematic callouts). Automated checks supplemented with full-text human review.

Week 6 — delivery and handover. Translated DOCX files, ready for the client’s DTP team. Updated TMs (TMX format, separated per language pair). Updated glossary (TBX). One-page change log per language documenting every editorial decision. Plus a 30-minute handover call with the client’s loc lead.

Tools used

memoQ (server project, shared TM and TB), Microsoft Word with structured comment threads, Python scripts for tag validation and cross-reference integrity, Resend for daily progress emails to the client.

Outcome

Delivered on schedule. Zero post-delivery defect tickets in the 90-day post-launch window. The client adopted the unified TM as their go-forward reference, retiring the previous fragmented vendor-specific TMs. The flagged source-side terminology discrepancies were rolled back into the German source for the next manual revision.