Automated Translation with SCHEMA ST4 and DeepL

With more than 20,000 employees at 190 sites, the REHAU Group is represented across the entire globe. The company, which specializes in the processing of polymers, had its beginnings in the Upper Franconian town of the same name and production now takes place on an international scale. The working methods on which operations are based are recorded in process documentation to ensure that employees around the world always apply the same standards.

Colleagues all over the world receive information in their native language

"Because we are constantly developing our production processes further, our internal process documentation is changing all the time," explains Yannick Rank, process engineer at subgroup REHAU Industries. "We have to make these changes available to the production sites as soon as feasibly possible. To manage this, we use the module-based approach provided by SCHEMA ST4." He explained how this works in detail at Quanos Connect 2024.

The process documentation is created in German in the central engineering department at REHAU Industries in Germany. To translate texts into English and then into other languages, the technical writers use AI-based tool DeepL. "We only use these documents internally; the translation quality is sufficient for our purposes," explains Rank. The English-language version is checked by technical writers in Germany. For all other reviews, REHAU Industries relies on the native language skills of staff at production sites abroad for quality assurance purposes.

Make reviews even more efficient

"The DeepL translations are automatically sent to native speakers at REHAU who then check them," explains Manfred Mehrer, team leader at Quanos Advanced Services. The staff has the option to approve a translation or suggest corrections using the comment function in the SlimClient review application. These change requests are then checked by the technical writing team and changes are made.

Revision will be even easier from next year, reports Manfred Mehrer: "WebAuthor, SCHEMA ST4's browser-based editor, is being optimized so that native speakers can make changes to texts independently." This will enable the REHAU technical writing team to save even more time.