Unified translation process for a medical device company
Abstract
Medtronic is the world leader in medical technology used to treat conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, neurological disorders and vascular illnesses. The business Cardiac Rhythm Disease Management focuses on managing the entire spectrum of cardiac rhythm disorders to improve long-term patient care. This includes implantable devices, such as pacemakers and defibrillators. A Cardiologist can remotely monitor an implanted device using a programmer.
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Over 180 applications are available, all in five languages.
Each of the business units had its own localization process for software (including self-built tooling) due to different architectural software styles, caused by company takeovers and cultural differences.
There was a strong demand for a unified localization process in order to (for example) promote consistencies amongst products from different business units and promoting flexibility of sharing translations between different projects. The translation department was orientating on standard out-of-the-box solutions for localization, but unfortunately, none of the solutions provided a solution for our non-Windows based Programmer legacy applications.
My vision is that a global company needs a standard process for localizing their materials (such as software and manuals) and translations should be available in a simple manner when new products need to be translated. This will reduce the duration of the localization cycle. Time and money saved can be invested in delivering more customer added value, such as new languages.
We found and implemented a solution using a standard tool (in a one-year time frame). The tool-vendor created an add-in in order to import our legacy resources in their tool. We adapted our processes and established a roadmap how to get to a unified localization process in our company. Per project we saved a spectacular effort on FTE, especially on testing, while maintaining the same quality.
Case study details
Product development facts
| Quality: | Medical products have the highest possible quality. This not only includes device capabilities, but also the quality of translations. Testing is an integral activity of development activities. |
| Diversity: | A multinational company has several divisions, each having one or more business units. Products are developed in a business unit according a development process using a specific system and software architecture. When a product must be localized, depending on the used process and architecture, a specific localization process and localization toolset is used. Often, a business unit uses multiple processes and architectures. |
| Multisite: |
Many products are developed multi-site, which means that teams may be located all over the world.
Therefore, the processes have to deal with different time-zones. For example, when the translators
are located in Europe and the developers in the US, there is only half a day of overlap.
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Anecdote: when I visited the Europe-based translation department, I noticed that an italian translator was,
let's say, 'unhappy'.
When I asked her what happened, she said that she has to remotely review the latest version on a programmer that is physically based
at the engineering department in the US. The engineers had accidently started the application in the french language.
Consequence was that the italian translator had to wait half a day until an engineer in the US restarted the machine
in the italian language!
This situation was simply caused by the fact that the process was designed by engineers in the US that were not aware of the environment in which the translators had to operate. Later on, we redefined the process such that the programmer was located at the translators (the developers had to upload the latest software versions to that machine). |
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| Terminology: | Features may be exchanged between various products of different divisions. This, however, does not imply that the translations can also be exchanged. Different terminologies may be used for similar features. The translation department shall be able to maintain consistency amongst products. |