Würth Group’s self-service machine translation solution for internal communication
Würth Group is an internationally operating group comprising more than 400 companies in 80 countries. German and English have been chosen as the corporate languages to facilitate smooth communication between the individual entities of the Group. This means that the majority of publications, guidelines, documentation, etc. must be available in both languages.
With the Group’s headquarters and most central functions located in Germany, employees face a daily need for instant German-to-English translations of various types of texts and documents. Given the great advancement of machine translation quality in recent years, Würth Group started to seek machine translation solutions to support and round off their formerly exclusively human translation services and provide a self-service solution for internal communication purposes.
As their employees translate their own texts, it was mandatory for such a machine translation system to ensure consistent Würth Group’s unique corporate language. The Tilde custom machine translation offered the opportunity to train engines specifically with Würth Group’s data and TMs, while at the same time providing a high level of data security thanks to the servers being hosted in the European Union.
Tilde custom machine translation solution ticked all the boxes important to Würth:
- Engine training based on Würth’s very own translation memories and termbases
- Tilde API allowing integration into Würth’s system environment (Group intranet, Outlook plugin)
- Self-service machine translation solution via text input or document upload (DE <> EN, ES)
- Wide range of file formats suitable for machine translation (including Excel files)
- Terminology integration to ensure unique corporate wording; easy terminology management
- Tilde plugin for Trados CAT tool for the internal translation team
- Data security
Since 2021, when the solution was implemented, Tilde MT systems have helped Würth save on both translation time and costs, with more translations being processed in a shorter time. Now Würth employees can translate their internal memos, emails, and general communication themselves in just a few seconds, while the team of internal translators focuses on high-quality human translation projects, which are to be published externally.
Data analytics show that Würth Group’s employees use the internal machine translation solution a lot, and its use keeps growing. In 2021, about 403 thousand words were translated via Tilde MT, whereas in 10 months of 2023 – already 5.5 million words.
Thanks to the Tilde MT systems, we were able to drastically reduce the translation costs for Group-internal communication purposes, with costs per translated word dropping from just over 10 cents to less than one cent.
Susanne Sommerschuh
Corporate Communication of Würth Group
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