Weigl Case Study: Book Translation and Typesetting

August 30, 2010
Case Studies

Background

Weigl Publishers Inc, has been creating educational school library books for the international market since 1992. Weigl produces about 100 new titles each year.

Scope

Translation into Canadian French of 18 books consisting of approximately 200,000 words to be delivered in 20 business days. Delivery format was QuarkXpress.

Challenge

The source files were in QuarkXpress. Initially, the client asked for the translation as Word documents in a two-column format, with the English on one side and translation on the other. Delivery in this format would require not only re-creating all the Word documents, but the client would also have to copy and paste the translation from the Word files back into the Quark originals. This would have resulted in a very large amount of extra work and time from both ours and the client’s ends. This would also greatly increase the possibility of human error in the copy and paste stages. The client was also on a short timeline and needed to go to print with these books in less than a month.

Solution

We recommended another process in which we would export the English source files, translate the text, and import the translation back to Quark. The delivery would therefore be QuarkXpress. This would eliminate the need to create separate Word files or copying and pasting the translation back into Quark.

We used several translation teams to meet the mandatory deadline. The teams were specialized in the material being translated and consisted of translators, editors, proofreaders, and QA checkers.

The Benefits

This solution developed by wintranslation allowed the client to save time and money. The project was delivered on-time and to the client’s satisfaction.

Canadian French translation

From the time that wintranslation started working with Weigl, I was impressed with the company’s ability to handle a heavy workload with a tight deadline. (…) In addition, wintranslation proofread titles that had been translated by another company, providing exceptional feedback that drastically improved the overall quality of the books.
Wintranslation’s work is of the highest quality, and I am happy to recommend them to you without reservation.

Managing Editor, Weigl Publishers

Felicia Bratu is the operations manager of wintranslation, in charge of quality delivery and client satisfaction. As a veteran who has worked in many roles at the company since 2003, Felicia oversees almost every aspect of the company operations from recruitment to project management to localization engineering. She recently received certification as a Localization Project Manager as well as Post-Editing Certification for Machine Translation. Felicia holds a BSc. in Industrial Robotics from the University of Craiova, Romania.