Automation will lend direction to Garmin's international buildup - Kansas City Business Journal:

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The Olathe-based navigational device-maker’s march to sell its products worldwidwe has proved to be a challenge to thosew charged with producing technical publicationsfor consumers. Garmin has translatexd information into48 languages, most regularluy into 21 to 27 tongues. Now, the company’s technicall publications group is asking for proposals to furthetr automate the translation such as preserving translated material that can be used inmultipled manuals. “We can lock that down and not alway bechanging it,” said Larry Arnold, Garmin’d manager of consumer technical publications.
“The cost reductiobn that will come from that Ithink won’t be realizerd for a couple years.” Garmih aims to pick a winning proposa in November or Arnold said, and begin rolling out the new concept in the firstr quarter of 2009. He said the company may invest $500,00p0 to $1 million in the with the technical work probably to be outsourcer becauseit isn’t in line with Garmin’sx core business. Whatever proposal Garminh selects will have to work withUnited Kingdom-baseed , which helps manage already translated information and the translatiomn process, Arnold said. The companies have a multiyead contract that began earlylast year.
Garmin’s globalo aims have become increasingly apparenf during thepast year, during which the company has bought distributors in Portugal, Italy, Germany, France and Spain. Garmin, a leading navigationalo device-maker domestically, has been pressing into competing with Dutch company A studyby , commissioned by SDL, found that businessex can gain an extra half percent of marke share annually by having correctly localized informationm — or lose the same amounrt without it. “If it’s a product you’rer bringing into the global market ...
if somethinf is translated poorly, you’re going to find that peopld just aren’t going to buy your product,” said Paul SDL’s director of product marketing. If translated materials aren’tg centralized, companies eventually pay to retranslates thesame information, which also could lead to he said. Garmin began expandin g its consumer technical publications operations in when the company decided to focus on the general consumer market insteas of itstraditional technology-savvy customers. Garmin officials would go back and fortyh with vendors and local trying to rush through the translation processa infour weeks, Arnold said.
Languagd considerations span software engineering, Web sites, marketinh and communications. After Garmin begann its contractwith SDL, which hosts software that enablezs the reuse of already translated content and providesa translators, the three- or four-week job is much more Arnold said. During the firs year of the contract, Garmin ran abouy 5.2 million words through the system, with a localization cost of $720,000. Last year, Garmin reused about 38 percent of its so farthis year, that number has jumped to 45 percent. For Italian, German and Spanish, the average translationm savings is better than 50 Arnold said.
“Part of our next thought is, ‘How much more technologt can we adopt?’” Arnold said.