Client Case Study
Client: Mitutoyo Canada
Background
Japan-based Mitutoyo manufactures precision measurement tools used in the manufacturing industry worldwide. The company operates globally doing business in many different countries. Mitutoyo Canada has offices located in Quebec, Canada’s predominantly French speaking, bilingual province where English and French have to be presented in all media forms equally, but with French first.
Recently, Mitutoyo Canada came under the scrutiny of the Quebec government because the company wasn’t operating at 100% in both official languages. As Mitutoyo operates offices in the province of Quebec, it is obliged under Quebec provincial law to ensure all content is available in both English and French.
In late 2005 the Quebec government sent Mitutoyo Canada a letter requiring them to comply with this bi-lingual obligation as it was reported that the Mitutoyo Web site was not fully bi-lingual.
The Challenge – Localize Or Be Fined
If Mitutoyo did not comply immediately with the Quebec government request it would start facing upwards of a thousand dollars a day in fines. So the company immediately sprung into action.
They had only a month before the penalties started.
Their challenge was how to localize, turn into Quebec French, 192 pages of English language content as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible, ideally in a way that would allow them to keep their content current and easily maintainable in both official languages moving forward?
The Solution - Clay Tablet – Implemented In Weeks
Mitutoyo Canada’s first priority was to find a translation service provider who would be able to work within such extreme deadlines, at such short notice. They selected ACCU Translations of Toronto.
ACCU Translations accepted Mitutoyo’s challenge of translating all the company’s content on time. ACCU Translations were a Clay Tablet Partner and immediately referred Mitutoyo to Clay Tablet Technologies in order to integrate their content management system with ACCU Translations’ translation software system. It was thought by everyone that this would speed up the content translation process, make it as efficient as possible and establish a long-term process for managing ongoing translation projects.
Clay Tablet was quickly integrated and its built-in translation workflow features were set-up to pass individual content elements to ACCU, from within the CMS itself, such as complete pages, specific paragraphs and even individual graphics.
After the translation of these individual content elements was complete, the translated content then automatically flowed back into the CMS without any human intervention.
The Results - A Full Translation In Only Days
The results were outstanding! All the members of the translation project team pulled together and accomplished the full translation into Quebec French of all the English content in only a few days. Normally this would have taken months.
Not only did Clay Tablet make the one-time translation process easy and efficient, Clay Tablet also built an ongoing translation workflow process that promises to save the company considerable amounts of time and money as content changes in the future.
As content changes in English, it will be flagged and sent automatically in the background to the translation professionals at ACCU.
The system means Mitutoyo will never have face the project management nightmare of having to manage the translation of individual bits and pieces of its content as it changes over time. And anyone across the company with appropriate privileges will be able to initiate and incorporate translations without any involvement from IT.
Greg Milne, the Mitutoyo Canada IT specialist in charge of the Clay Tablet integration, is pleased that even non-technical personnel in marketing and advertising can now make translation changes to promotions on the company’s web site without IT’s involvement, it will get translated into French automatically. Even the translation process of marketing collaterals and documents associated with promotions can be automated by Clay Tablet.
As Milne put it, “Clay Tablet has gone far beyond what I expected its product to do.”
Next stop, the world?
Mitutoyo is so pleased with Clay Tablet they are recommending the solution to Mitutoyo’s regional offices worldwide. Each of the company’s regional offices are all responsible for their own local corporate Web sites, so Milne foresees the company saving considerable time and money by using Clay Tablet across the entire organization.
Some key elements to Clay Tablet’s appeal are its ability to be hosted locally in each country, not just centrally, and its ability to interface with whatever local translation service provider each regional office may already use.