Neopost Technologies Ltd – cost-effective, high-quality translations through technology
Neopost Technologies Ltd (NTL), a division of Neopost Group, designs and manufactures a range of high-end mailing machines for office and production mail solutions, aimed at optimising the sending and receiving of mail, parcels and emails. NTL’s solutions make business communications faster, cheaper and more efficient, so their clients can communicate more effectively, both internally and externally.
Agile translation of software and technical manuals
We offer fully localised translation and desktop publishing (DTP) services to give organisations the power to reach a fully global client base. The recent acquisition of International Translation Resources (ITR) into Capita’s portfolio also allows for a fully comprehensive software localisation service. Capita TI and ITR have been working with Neopost Technologies Ltd (NTL) to provide an end-to-end localisation service; covering translation, proofreading, DTP and QA for their machine User Interface and Operator Manuals.
The challenge
As Neopost have a direct presence in 19 countries, and their client base is from an even greater number of countries, it is important for NTL to have their material localised for all markets in question.
Following an increasing number of requests from agents for NTL’s material to be made available in foreign languages to target export markets, the multinational company turned to Capita TI and ITR respectively for the translation and localisation of their Operator Manuals and machine User Interface.
ITR have translated into the following languages for Neopost: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, European Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Russian. Working with such a large volume of languages can raise challenges over consistency and cost, so these were top-priority concerns for NTL.
How Capita and ITR helped
The UI has space limitations so strings had to be translated to approximately the same length of the original text to avoid truncations due to typical text expansion in foreign languages.
Strict adherence to existing string set terminology, run-time variables and style conventions were required to ensure translation consistency and valid parsing. ITR setup included dedicated virtual machines in their Testlab for secure remote testing.
Capita TI worked on the translation of the Operator Manuals, ensuring one linguist worked on the translation itself, and a second linguist was applied to the proofreading phase. Proofreading is an integral part of Capita’s localisation process, as it ensures quality and consistency across all material. Once the translation process was complete, Capita undertook an independent Linguistic Quality Assurance phase on the manuals, to ensure the highest level of quality. In order to ensure the translated manuals were consistent with the source English manuals, Capita applied their DTP service, to reformat and design the localised documents, getting them ready to be printed. At this stage the localised screenshots were inserted into the finished manuals.
During the localisation process, Capita and ITR worked to produce multilingual glossaries for approval by Neopost. These glossaries help to maintain consistency not only across material, but also across languages, as only client approved terminology is used.
In order to help NTL reduce costs, Capita and ITR were able to produce client-specific Translation Memories (TMs). These TMs store translated words and phrases for future use across localised material, meaning that the next time a similar word or phrase appears, the translation phase does not need to be repeated, saving time and therefore cost.
What Neopost said:
“At NTL, we have been gratified to find that Capita TI has quickly understood our needs and has produced some excellent work for us.”
“Thank you very much, files downloaded and looking excellent.”
What’s next?
NTL would like to expand into the Chinese market and have begun to make inroads into this. This is just the start of things to come for NTL, and Capita TI will be on hand to help with the translation of further user manuals, to help NTL become a true global exporter.