When it comes to ensuring the growth of a brand in the food industry, there are many requirements and expectations that need to be considered, including labeling standards, seasonality and the launch of new products.
The communication department of a business leader in the chocolate industry looking to produce content and communication materials that meet its requirements and desired brand image wanted to surround itself with a linguistic team capable of adapting its content over the long term.
Putting together a dedicated team and contacts who understood the requirements of the industry from both a linguistic and technical point of view was essential to this collaboration – a collaboration that continues to this day.
We will examine the challenges identified prior to the collaboration and the solutions provided by the Acolad team to learn more about the general benefits a brand can gain from using a language service provider offering DTP services to centralize its projects.
A global, comprehensive, successful translation project to create a consistent brand image
The brand’s international ambitions, distribution of visual content across multiple markets, and need to convey a consistent tone and brand image led to the search for an agency capable of establishing efficient long-term processes managed by dedicated contacts who are familiar with the industry.
With its own in-house translators for certain languages, the client wanted to translate its catalogs into even more languages and to ensure consistency between all its materials. To do so, it was thus essential to have in-house linguists and proofreaders who were familiar with the brand’s requirements and who could create a dedicated glossary.
To ensure that its B2C and B2B product catalogs, recipe booklets, recipe sheets, brochures and labels are all properly adapted, the brand’s marketing department wanted to work with a company that could provide both linguistic and graphic adaptation of its content. Such a collaboration would ensure that the materials adapted in American English, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch all respected the style guide requirements of their respective language with the same degree of care.
Lastly, with the year being punctuated by multiple holidays such as Easter and Christmas in addition to other more regular projects that contribute to creating a certain dynamic among its customers, the brand wanted to be able to count on dedicated contacts who could oversee subsidiary approval and ensure that deadlines were met for all languages.
A bespoke partnership backed by a team versed in the requirements of the food industry
To meet all the client’s challenges, Acolad offered a bespoke partnership including:
- a pair of experienced project managers familiar with France’s INCO standards, crucial to the agri-food industry;
- native linguists working closely with a team of graphic designers specialized in adapting multilingual visual content.
At the center of each project is a client-dedicated translation memory containing all the terms approved by the client’s subsidiaries throughout their various projects. It is set up by our project managers the moment they begin working with the client and is continually updated by our in-house linguists.
The adaptation of B2C and B2B product catalogs, recipe booklets, recipe sheets, brochures and labels requires multiple steps, each as indispensable as the last when it comes to ensuring the quality of the client’s print-ready materials:
- Preparation of the idml files
- Analysis of the volume and pre-translations
- Quote
- Resegmentation
- Pre-translation
- Optimisation
- Translation
- Proofreading
- DTP
- In-house + subsidiary press proof
- Client approval
- Delivery
Brand benefits made possible by a long-standing partnership
The benefits for the client are clear. They are able to harmonise their content and see results from this, and the quality and effectiveness of their multilingual materials are bolstered due to the DTP being handled by experienced teams.
From a purely technical point of view, centralizing their adaptation needs means that when the author makes editorial or graphic changes to the source file, all the target files can be modified at the same time. Acolad's graphic design teams also simplify the transition to the printing stages by integrating these changes into the final print-ready files.
Next up: exploring solutions to improve our efficiency
Acolad continues to evolve alongside its clients. To improve our effectiveness when working on clients’ various projects, the graphic design team has set up an automated system for performing certain repetitive tasks. The goal is to save time and thus better meet deadline requirements and, above all, to be consistent across all documents being produced for the same client.
This automated system includes:
- Automating style guides for each language by developing scripts in InDesign;
- Importing Adobe Acrobat comments directly into InDesign files, thus making it easier for the graphic design team to integrate corrections. This latter step required in-house linguists to use Adobe Acrobat’s standard annotation functions.
This major agri-food industry client’s projects also include videos, a highly popular medium. Our existing methods helped deploy this new format by providing subtitles for the brand’s videos, contributing to its international reach.
