The East Flemish Spiromatic is a world leader in terms of automated systems for food processing, dough production and fermentation. Industrial bakeries all over the world use Spiromatic machines and silos to guarantee a smooth production process. They have been working with Wilkens since 2016 for all their technical documentation, at home and abroad. We give them a general solution for the writing of the manual and its translation right up to the final lay-out.
“Since we started working with Wilkens, the quality of our manuals has improved considerably. This has made it much easier for our clients to take the right actions during production, maintenance or in the event of problems.” Praise indeed from Jesse Coucke, Standardisation engineer at Spiromatic.
Writing a manual
We have been writing the manuals for all their new machines since 2016. A process called technical writing. In technical writing, it is important to consider legislation and various criteria, to ensure clarity and safety for the users. So, for technical writing, we collaborate with the specialist in technical documentation in the Benelux: Data Concept Technologies (DCT). Our close contact with them means we can perfectly align the process of technical writing and translation.
For the Spiromatic manuals, we have a regular technical writer. This writer often goes to the factories to see the machines in real life and understand better how they work. A service which has a very positive impact on the quality of the manuals.
Translating for foreign customers
The manuals are always composed in Dutch, but in most countries, it is a legal requirement to make the manuals available in all the official national languages. When users read the manual in their own language, the risk of misinterpretation is smaller.
We translate all the manuals into many languages, including, French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Polish and Czech. Our translation memories for Spiromatic are a great advantage, because many manuals contain similar parts. With the translation memory, we can reuse previous translations. This ensures consistency, a shorter processing time and a cheaper translation.
Jesse is clearly very happy with the cooperation. “The timing is always respected. In fact, I usually receive the translation earlier than originally agreed,” he says.
The perfect lay-out
A translation can sometimes change the lay-out of a file. Sentences in French are generally longer than in Dutch, resulting in some text boxes appearing to be too small after translation, tables shifting and images no longer in the right place. Which is why our project managers check all the translations to put everything back in the right place.
“I can see in the way the tables and figures are formatted that they operate very meticulously and carefully. The fact that all the manuals are formatted in the same way makes everything easy to read for our customers,” says Jesse. Because we follow the house style very precisely, Jesse can quickly get to work with the manuals.
Do you have manuals that need to be translated and put in the correct lay-out? We can help you with that. Please contact us via info@wilkens.be or on +32 (0)9 265 00 40. Our account and project managers are happy to help.
