OEM&Lieferant Ausgabe 1/2019

108 Engineering Partner Introduction of a modern translation tool for display texts By Sven Drews, Project Manager System Development, ServiceXpert, Munich Nowadays, premium domestic appliances offer end customers numerous functionalities, which of course also require a corresponding choice of language. For this reason, the world´s leading manufacturer of premium domestic appliances, Miele & Cie. KG, has commissioned the engineering service provider ServiceXpert Gesellschaft für Service-Informationssysteme mbH to develop the necessary new translation tool. The aim of the assignment was the concep- tual design and implementation of an inno- vative management tool for the translation of display texts to replace the existing trans- lation tool, which had been in use for more than 10 years. Due to the ever-shorter pro- duction cycles of new models, the quality and consistency of translations can only be achieved with the help of tools. Miele‘s de- vices support more than 35 languages, which presents special challenges for the tool, such as the bidirectional Arabic language. As a large translation project has up to 4,000 ref- erence texts, the individual functions of the new Miele translation tool were coordinated in detail during the concept phase in close cooperation with Miele and the key trans- lators. After an intensive development and test phase, the application was transferred to productive operation at Miele. The translation tool runs as a web applica- tion on a central server and is called up via a browser. By using a web application, the installation of software on the user‘s PC can be dispensed with. The translations are stored centrally in a database and new trans- lation projects are imported into this data- base via an import interface based on XML and Unicode formats. Existing projects can also be updated via additive import. During the import, projects are locked for editing. Translated texts can be exported in XML and Unicode format for further processing in the next step. ServiceXpert engineers have developed ad- ditional components to track deadlines and translation costs. Translation management is based on a role concept with a total of nine roles provided. Project access, read or write access and the scope of functions can be controlled via different roles, thus enabling extremely flexible scheduling of transla- tors in the various translation projects. The Images: © ServiceXpert GmbH