Automotive and Manufacturing

The second feature of the sector is that its documents work by reference to one another. A part number has to appear in exactly the same form on the drawing, in the control plan, in the service manual and in the purchasing system. Consistency broken in a single place leaves its mark right along the chain.

The typical document set

Where does the terminology risk lie?

In automotive work the terminology risk arises where the sector’s own jargon collides with a company’s internal jargon. A component may have a settled name across the industry while the company goes on using another one inherited from its own history. Which of the two the translation should follow is not a matter of preference but a decision for the client, and it has to be asked at the outset.

The second risk is abbreviations. The language of quality and production is dense with them, and most are used in the target language in their own established form. Turning them needlessly into Turkish, or at the other extreme never explaining them at all, are two separate mistakes; the right approach is to spell the term out where it first appears and keep the abbreviation thereafter.

The third risk is the sequence of actions in instructional text. When the order of an assembly step changes, what follows may be not only a defective product but a hazard to safety at work. Numbering and the conjunctions of time are therefore a check item of their own when instructions are translated.

Confidentiality and auditability

The drawings and process information shared along the supply chain are the vehicle manufacturer’s intellectual property and are usually covered by a non-disclosure agreement signed with the supplier. That obligation has to be passed on unchanged to the translation supplier. The point to watch in practice is that the chain of confidentiality reaches all the way down to subcontractors.

Auditability is the second heading. Quality systems expect the revision history of a document to be traceable. On the translation side that means keeping a record of which version was translated, when, and from which source revision. A translation carrying no version information looks, in an audit, like a record with nothing behind it.

Spare parts and aftersales content

In the automotive and machinery sectors most of the translation volume comes not from the product itself but from what happens after the sale. Spare parts catalogues, service bulletins, fault code descriptions and warranty procedures are all updated continuously, and all of them bear directly on how the service network performs.

What marks this group of content out is high repetition and low creativity. The same procedure recurs across dozens of models. Managed with a translation memory, the unit cost of such content falls sharply; left unmanaged, the same texts are paid for again with every model year.

Fault code descriptions call for attention of their own. These strings are usually very short, stripped of context, and appear on their own on the technician’s screen. Brevity does not make them easier to translate; on the contrary, they are the kind of text most open to being misread. Supplying the code list together with its context information reduces that risk.

Supplier audits and translation

Vehicle manufacturers audit their suppliers on a regular basis, and those audits are often carried out by auditors from abroad. Before the audit, the quality manual, the procedures and sample records are translated into the auditor’s language; during the audit itself, interpreting comes into play.

The critical point in audit translation is preserving the severity of the findings. The difference between an observation and a non-conformity carries entirely different consequences for the supplier. In the same way, the wording of time limits and scope in corrective action commitments has to be carried across exactly.

Correspondence after the audit is held to the same discipline. Closure reports and verification records are taken as references in later audits, so the terms chosen have to stay consistent across the audit cycles.

Export and market entry documents

For a manufacturer entering a new market, the need for translation does not stop at product documentation. Declarations of conformity, test reports, certificates of origin and customs paperwork are translated into the language of the target market as well. These are documents for official process and they often call for a further layer of approval.

The commonest mistake with this group is approaching them with the logic of technical text. A declaration of conformity is not a technical document but a legal undertaking; widening or narrowing its scope creates liability. These documents should therefore be handled in a workflow separate from product manuals, with a separate check.

Dealership and distribution agreements belong in the same group. The definition of territory, exclusivity, minimum purchase commitments and termination conditions are all clauses that have to be translated with the discipline of legal text. Which document is required in which country, and in what form, is something we set out in our country guide.

Trade fair and promotional material is a wholly different category. Catalogues, presentations and stand copy call for persuasiveness as much as technical accuracy, and when they run through the same workflow as the technical documentation team they usually come out dry and ineffective. Preparing these texts in a separate workflow, signed off by the marketing team, gives a better result.

The working model

One-off work is almost unheard of in this sector. The established model is an annual framework agreement: unit price bands, turnaround times, revision management rules and confidentiality terms are settled once. All that happens order by order is notifying the volume and the date.

The real gain from a framework arrangement in this sector is the terminology asset it builds up. A termbase and a translation memory grown over the years bring down the cost of new documents and mean that a revision update touches only the part that has actually changed. In an update for a new model year, only a small share of the total text is genuinely new.

You can work out a language plan for your export markets from the language pages, look over the banded pricing logic on the pricing page, and use the quote form to discuss a framework arrangement.

This page is for information; the process and the requirements may be updated from time to time. Confirm the details with the body you will be submitting the documents to.