One of the world’s top medical device companies and providers of imaging solutions turned to Morningside for our expertise in MadCap Flare translations.
Dedicated to supplying imaging solutions, our medical device client introduced their revolutionary technology to support the detection, investigation and monitoring of various conditions.
When our relationship began in 2010, both of our companies had become advanced users of MadCap Flare (or Flare) after being early adopters of the software. When they were recommended to Morningside, the client was seeking a localization and translation company for technical translations with matching experience and values. We started with localizing 11 languages, which has now evolved to 30 languages, including hundreds of hours saved through process improvements.
The Challenge
Our client, although they already had an existing provider, started looking for a language solutions partner because they had three distinct challenges ahead of them;
- Their current provider was not meeting expectations and showed an apparent misunderstanding of how to use Flare properly. They needed a provider who not only understood but had expertise in it!
- They needed a company that could be trusted to be reliable and produce high-quality results – a fundamental expectation for their supplier relationship.
- They needed their software translated, requiring their new provider to have the expertise for localizing both their Flare project and software.
The Solution
Our client reached out to us to establish a partnership based on a word-of-mouth recommendation from a then-MadCap associate. We proceeded with our client upon their request with a detailed quoting and evaluation process.
This process included a series of technical questions, which revealed our team’s extensive knowledge about Flare, building trust with the client. Before we started translating, we completed a Term Base and Style Guide for their initial 11 languages.
We completed the translation, full localization and LQA of the software first, then the Flare documentation after that, to ensure we could refer to the finalized UI strings in each language.
“Implementation was seamless. It is important that is the case – boring is good! For projects of this magnitude, you ‘don’t want surprises,” said our client.
The Journey
Since beginning this partnership and implementing our services, we have helped our clients with their Flare project’s English authoring and structure. ‘We’ve helped optimize it for translation and mitigate current and future concerns in the localization process while reducing the time and costs.
There has been a continual process of improvement over the years that have included:
– Advising on snippet formats. This ranged from recommending changes to existing snippets to avoid linguistic issues in translation to suggesting the creation and organization of snippets for UI strings.
– Supporting our client’s UI string references in Flare – they have had three different software applications, all with varying languages translated. So, we created a UI string reference PDF in their Flare project to pull in each application string reference, with special instructions by language, to check and confirm the format for all strings in one place. This process has helped us with ensuring consistency.
– Creating special conditions and pages to produce the multilingual regional PDFs required by the client and adding those to the original English Flare project. We have since optimized the conditions even further for the current requirements: bilingual PDFs for specific countries and monolingual for most others.
– Account advising. When our client has had upcoming changes, we have collaborated to determine the impact on localization. For instance, how would their latest development of setting up conditions for each device feature impact translation, the reuse of translation memory content, and the production of the final localized PDFs?
“During English development, we review structure changes and any significant content changes. Morningside recently completed a large update of source files for 30 languages – I can always collaborate with our partners at Morningside and get feedback. This helps ensure that the English source project is optimized for localization. Morningside will often give us their feedback along with reasonings– communication with our teams is essential, and they do an excellent job,” our client explained.
Our close relationship allows both organizations to work in unison as one team – challenging each other to improve and produce high-quality results.
“All of the progress we have made has been a shared effort with no one team driving – it is a collaboration,” our client expressed.
Our scope reduction for translation updates is standard practice for us, but likely not for all Flare translation providers. When a previously translated Flare project needs to be updated to match the current English, we don’t reprocess all files for translation. Instead, we use a custom tool to compare the previous English Flare and the new English Flare to see which files have changed and stayed the same.
For any files that remained the same and were previously translated, we reuse those files instead of reprocessing them. This helps cut down on the translation scope and the LQA scope, which helps reduce time and cost for updates. We implemented this practice for the medical device client, as we do for many others.
Fundamentally our client’s needs haven’t changed much throughout our relationship – however, the Flare software has updated and become more advanced, offering more features. We have adapted with it and matured our processes and recommendations right along with the Flare product.
In the last year and a half, we evaluated the client’s Flare project. We determined that we could make additional, customized efficiencies in the translation process without sacrificing the final quality of the outputs. These efficiencies saved the client both time and money.
“The last quote we received said we saved 33 hours with the improvements we made,” our client pointed out.
Our Partnership
As our partnership has evolved, we have significantly decreased our client’s turnaround time and increased their cost savings. In 2020 alone, we saved our client 146 hours and thousands of dollars. We have always partnered with our clients to reduce costs to meet their budget and continually improve our processes – making them more efficient and cost-productive.
We have even had the opportunity to extend our services beyond standard Flare translation. Since our partnership in 2010, we have helped them in various ways; back-translating localized PDFs, comparing different versions of localized PDFs and providing change reports, implementing localized text provided by regulators in Flare, and helping add in regulatory conditions to the Flare project so we can produce custom PDFs for specific countries with special regulatory text.
Our project lead, Jennifer Schudel, says, “I feel incredibly gratified that our relationship has been so strong for so many years. A big part of working together for so long and so closely – we get the opportunity to collaborate. We strive to work hard and meet their needs, and to think creatively”.
Our client feels Morningside is an extension of her authoring department: “We are a partnership – the behavior and communication go both ways. It has gone on for so long that we have experienced instances where we can discuss the technical components from earlier in projects. With our collective knowledge and experience, conversations get very detailed very quickly”. Our client expressed.
Morningside and our medical device client have focused our relationship around clear communication, sharing and building on our wealth of knowledge and experience to deliver incredible support and high-quality Flare outputs.