French Product Catalog Translation: A 400,000-Word Engineering Feat

Sometimes we receive projects that make my jaw drop open.  That may sound like an exaggeration, but when scrolling through scores of current language translation, most of which are several pages of legal translation, business translation, or other types of moderate length, and then one pops up that lists a product catalog translation with a word count of almost 400,000 words - it is a bit shocking. 400,000 words? That's longer than a lot of full-length novels.  But then again, we do have fantastic translators who continue to amaze both us and our clients.

The professional translation required an entire team of French translators with engineering backgrounds and/or engineering translation experience - and plenty of it.  The catalog contained the entire tool stock of a very famous, well-known brand name of tools, appliances, hardware, and many other products (sorry, actual client names are protected by client-provider agreements). At any rate, this was a huge job, especially since DTP was also included.

A product catalog translation of this size will vary in the amount of time it takes to complete it, depending upon the size of the translation team, proofreading, and other inclusions like DTP, in this particular case. English to French translation of each section of the catalog was assigned to a different French translator with equivalent and sufficient engineering background and/or engineering translation experience. The reason engineering translation experience was required of our French translators for this project was due to the types of tools in the catalog, and consequential occasional engineering jargon and technical translation requirements.

Product catalog translation finds its way into our translation services at least once a month or so, but engineering translation services find their way to us much more frequently. Recently we have also provided engineering translation services for manufacturing companies, as well as some technical handbooks and instruction manuals. As such, it was not difficult to assign French translators with the proper training and specialized translation skills in engineering for this monster translation of a product catalog.