Kaffeekranz with substance

Why sitting down with stakeholders helps us drive efficiency and quality for our medical technology client

Our clients expect high-quality translations. Quickly, simply and with a minimum of fuss.

For many of our customers we work practically undetected in the background – simply working to make our customers’ lives easier. In contrast, we have a much closer working relationship with other companies, such as with our long-standing client in the medical technology sector. We have just returned from such a meeting and wanted to share some impressions of the collaboration.

Our client is an international medical technology company that manufactures complex equipment with robotics and software components for use in diagnostic and clinical applications. The localization requirement is for the devices’ user interfaces and extensive user documentation for up to 25 markets.

We have held regular meetings since the collaboration began and the client values our ideas when it comes to improving processes. We also uphold a culture of openness and transparency by engaging with the external technical editorial team in the meetings. This allows us to shine a light on the entire content creation process regarding the interplay between (external) editorial staff, Gemino and the customer’s (internal) localization manager. Experience shows that it is at precisely these points of contact where the need for coordination is at its greatest. The fact that both we and the editorial team are acquainted with the customer’s processes (and the individuals with each other) provides us with the best possible basis for coordinating our approach. We can directly agree on many decisions, which minimizes misunderstandings and increases efficiency.

What makes this type of collaboration tick? All participants must trust one another and make the time to discuss and exchange ideas. However, experience shows that, when everything is said and done, this method saves both time and costs as it results in more efficient processes and thus better translations.

Our meeting was also a highlight for a different reason: several project managers for the various high-tech medical devices took the time to demonstrate two of the devices, which we were also able to try out for ourselves. We also had the opportunity to watch videos of operations on actual patients. In this context, our work takes on a very practical dimension, far removed from the world of translation memories, terminological databases and authoring systems: we see the final result – and it is very impressive.

We are proud to have made an important contribution.