Case study: Annual report translation

The client:

Heijmans, one of the largest construction firms in the Netherlands.

The assignment:

All 226 pages of this listed company’s 2015 annual report had to be translated from Dutch to English within three weeks, and the specific company terminology had to be consistent with the 2014 annual report.

The challenge:

Automatic reuse of the 2014 report was not possible. The client had also set the requirement that their own in-house team had to be able to make all kinds of changes to the Dutch source text in the last few days, and they needed the translations themselves to be editable in InDesign. The client also sent an adjusted terminology list that took precedence over all earlier terminology lists.

Our solution:

AVB asked the client to provide the definitive version of the report in Dutch and English as InDesign files in order to maintain the original format. The Dutch and English InDesign files were then aligned and saved sentence-by-sentence into a translation memory (an intelligent translation database). The client’s new terminology list was also imported into the translation memory. This guaranteed consistency with previous translations and saved the client time and money. Furthermore, the terminology check identified whether the terms in the terminology list had been applied. The translation was delivered on the desired date, with the desired layout and featuring the desired terminology and style.