Translation management at Würth: Putting quality and service into words

The Würth Group operates though more than 400 national subsidiaries in 80 countries, with over. 87,000 employees ensuring a strong local presence for customers ranging from small trade businesses to international industrial companies.

This decentralized structure allows the Würth Group to respond flexibly to the needs of local markets and adapt to their individual requirements. To this end, almost every national subsidiary has its own online shop, which provide content in local languages, offering another opportunity to reach more than four million individual customers around the world.

But the Group’s structure and growing size also presented it with challenges: namely, that it became increasingly difficult to describe products uniformly across all languages. This was partly due to the fact that the national subsidiaries translated the content of their online shops themselves. “Translations were carried out by different people at each company as needed – and the results were as varied as the contributors. This meant that there could be up to five different designations being used for a single product,” says Stefan Kreß, Translation Management at Würth IT.

This situation led to a number of problems:

• Long lead times for translations meant that the content of local online shops was not up to date.
• Translation workload and costs were high due to the lack of a central, consolidated translation memory (TM) – databases that store all terms, sentence structures and sentence pairs that have ever been translated. Because the TM recognizes duplicate content, translation work does not need to be repeated.
• Many national subsidiaries were unable to cope with the translation volumes required.
• As a result, some online shops weren’t able to offer all the necessary information in their respective language(s).
• There was no company-wide terminology management, meaning that global consistency across different Würth texts could not be guaranteed.

Even before the introduction of translation management, Würth decided to introduce a central product information management (PIM) system in order to create the basis for a globally standardized product database across the Würth Group. A solution from Stibo Systems was chosen for master data management. Würth initially tried to translate the content using their own internal resources, but the volume was simply too great and the national subsidiaries were not able to keep up with constant amendments and additions. “At this point, we decided to change course and find a partner who could reliably handle the entire translation process,” explains Stefan Kreß. They found this partner in RWS, the world’s leading language services provider, who helped establish a comprehensive and effective localization model.

The translation management system (TMS) is extensive. The integrated translation memories grow as each project is completed, which reduces the turnaround time and cost of future translations while ensuring consistency.

• Process consulting and implementation
• WorldServer™ (web-based workflow system)
• Interfaces to in-house PIM system

RWS’s translation management system was connected to Würth’s PIM, allowing translation-related data to be exported/imported both automatically or manually. An FTP server provides the interface between the Stibo platform and the RWS system. Once the data is transferred to RWS, the text to be translated is extracted from the XML file, written to a translation file, compared against the translation memory and then translated. The translation is then sent to the respective Würth company for review, and the final version is used to update the TM. Once an XML file has been written from the final version, it is transferred to Würth’s FTP, where it is ready to be imported back into the databases. 

“We are confident that RWS is the perfect partner for the major projects that we undertake at Würth.” – Stefan Kreß, Translation Management at Würth IT.

The Würth Group has achieved a great deal in recent years by automating and centralizing its translation processes: its master data is now localized in 43 languages and its marketing content in 26 languages. This corresponds to the translation of around 10 million words per year. Terminology management systems are in place for 26 languages and more than 30 national subsidiaries now have fully localized online shops.

New markets and languages are being incorporated on an ongoing basis. The RWS project management team holds regular status calls with Stefan Kreß’s team to discuss current projects and day-to-day business. Topics such as the potential to cut cost, innovations and suggestions for improvement are also discussed at business review meetings.

Those national companies that have already engaged with the new system have been able to make the information in their online shops significantly more comprehensive and up to date.

Würth is focused on expansion and growth, and the new translation systems and processes support these corporate goals. Where previously only technical specifications were offered, more comprehensive information such as detailed product descriptions and application scenarios are now also available in relevant local languages.