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About Carlisle Fluid Technologies
Carlisle Fluid Technologies (CFT) is a leading manufacturer of application materials — think paints, powders, coatings, adhesives, foams, and the like. If you're in the manufacturing industry, you may already know of some of the brands in Carlisle's product portfolio, including DeVilbiss, Ransburg, Binks and Hosco.
With sales efforts focusing on markets in Europe, Asia, Oceania, and North America, the company has more than 1,000 colleagues working out of 27 branches in 9 countries. For such a global company, the need for localization spoke for itself.
What CFT was missing was a fast and accurate translation process that could help them get the products to market quickly. Luckily for the team at Carlisle, they found Redokun.
The Problem
You don't get very far in international markets without translation. Especially not when every single product you ship into a custom port needs documentation available in the local languages.
Money's on the line when you have to spend months translating a user guide to get the product out to the markets.
And when you have to spend company time and resources to fix mistakes in manuals that are already in the markets? Even more's at stake.
We met with James Bauer, Technical Writer, who led the initial process for translating user manuals and human-machine interfaces (HMI) at CFT.
He explained some of his team's initial challenges in moving translation projects forward.
Complicated and error-prone workflow
Managing global translation projects is tough when you rely on email to communicate and exchange files in 16 different languages with team members and partners across the world.
In James's own words:
Slow turnaround time and delays in product distribution
While Carlisle initially relied on a language service provider to translate their content, the time it took to receive the initial translations back was frustrating.
Tedious revision process in InDesign
Carlisle creates most of their documentation using Adobe InDesign, which is infamous for being a complicated file format to translate—both in terms of preparing files for translation and revising the translated files later on due to product updates.
Anyone who's ever worked with InDesign will relate to the struggles of overset text. (We know we do — that's one of the reasons Redokun was born!)
For Carlisle, hiccups with not setting up a proper flow for the text frames had very costly consequences. The text would run off the page, and once they got the work back, they realized there were thousands of words missing in the translations. Since the context of translations often changes based on what comes before and after, they often ended up having to redo the whole translation — tripling the costs.
High outsourcing costs
Even without InDesign text frame hiccups, the distributors in the markets would often have to correct mistakes in terminology once they received the physical copies.
James knew they needed a new solution once he saw the compounding costs of paying $25,000 or more for a single manual translation—only to then have to spend time on rewriting everything from scratch internally in every language.
Eventually, the high costs of outsourcing were getting difficult to justify for James and his team members.
The Solution
Once a Google search led him to Redokun, it didn't take long for both James and other stakeholders at the company to be convinced about the tool's value.
After just a few weeks of testing the tool, James got buy-in from his directors to get a yearly subscription once he was able to demonstrate 3x ROI just from the first manual translation alone.
He tells us the most important factor in looking for a new solution was turnaround time, followed by quality and cost — and Redokun ticked all the boxes for what they needed.
Simple, plug-and-play translation
When asked to describe how Redokun is helping him today, James explains:
With a streamlined workflow that condensed all of the tedious manual work of translating a file into many languages into a few simple steps, James and his team were able to free up time for other, more important work.
Easier task assignment, collaboration, and asset management
With Redokun, everything happens online in a single interface. For James, this meant he could assign tasks to distributors in the branches, have them go in and review automatically generated machine translations and correct them if needed.
Once they were done correcting the AI-generated translations, they could download and push the operation manuals to market directly from their end.
Since Redokun was so easy to use, they had no issues introducing the distributors to the tool as translators.
He adds:
Faster translation workflow with AI tools
In addition to using machine translation to generate automatic first drafts of translated text, James and his team liked that Redokun automatically saves approved translations in a database (what we like to call translation memory.)
This meant that they didn't have to spend time translating any words or phrases they have already translated before, since they could simply apply it automatically for repetitive content across all of their content.
Straight-forward revision and quality assurance process
As the product cycle works fast at Carlisle, the team finds themselves having to review their manuals often. When they were outsourcing translations to agencies, James tells us it would take three weeks every single time something had to get done or revised.
Of course, this was in addition to the time it took later to review and correct terminology errors in the documentation.
With Redokun, they can simply upload the new version of their document, and the tool will highlight only the new text for translation — while leaving the translations of unchanged sections intact.
This completely removed their dependency on translation agencies, which also led to a drastic increase in quality.
The ability to have distributors and other internal native speakers, who know the company and industry well, review the translated content quickly meant that they could go to market in days, not weeks — without having to worry about potential errors in the translated documentation.
James says:
The Results
Carlisle's improved translation workflow with Redokun enabled the company to achieve impressive results.
1/10 reduction in translation turnaround time
"Time-wise, it went from weeks or months down to days," James says. He adds that now, they actually spend more time correcting overset text from the translations than actually doing the translations.
James estimates that "it became about one tenth the amount of time to do the translations and the corrections included from overset text" compared to their previous solution.
$200K in reduced translation costs
James' conservative estimate of the amount of cost savings is in the ballpark of $200K, but he tells us that it's probably more, saying "that's ridiculous savings."
28x ROI
As Carlisle spent just $7,000 for a premium yearly subscription to Redokun, the initial investment has paid for itself at least 28x times over in the course of just one year.
Not a bad feat for a simple, bootstrapped tool. Maybe it's the Italian in us?
Towards the end, James jokes that "I don't know what it is about you Italians, but man, you've got some great programs out there."
Streamline your translation workflow with Redokun
Hundreds of manufacturing companies like Carlisle have saved time, improved translation quality, and reduced costs by using Redokun to streamline their workflow. Sign up for a free account, invite your team members to collaborate, and receive 10 000 words today!
