Translation of technical drawings

[Solutions for exporting and importing texts from AutoCAD drawings, enabling rapid translation and consistent terminology]

Design studios, technical offices, engineers and architects create thousands of AutoCAD drawings, many of which have to be translated into one or more languages. This need has led us to develop an innovative solution including the automatic extraction of texts from drawings and their translation and localisation in all languages and alphabets, using CAT technology, and importing the new language version into the original layout.

CAD drawings in European, Baltic, Northern and Indian languages and in Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Japanese!

Drawings for large-scale systems and projects include endlessly repeated terms, e.g. size, height, etc. Thanks to our solutions, we can ensure all repetitions of any single term are translated and positioned correctly on the CAD drawing layout at the cost for translating the single term.
This solution improves translation quality and safeguards terminology uniformity.

Our system can handle the translation of any CAD drawing in DWG and DXF. 

Our process is based on the use of state-of-the-art technologies capable of:

• extracting all terms from a technical drawing and presenting them to the translator in an easily manageable and translator-friendly text format capable of supporting specific functions such as spell checking;
• pre-translating recurrent terms by using translation software that recognises repeated or previously translated terms both within the drawing or in an existing translation memory, and submits it to the translator for his/her approval;
• reducing the extent of the translation process and improving quality of terminology, avoiding the re-translation of identical terms – previously translated and approved – and submitting any alternative translations of the same term to the translator;
• obtaining a new, perfectly translated CAD drawing, fully resized internally by us, thus avoiding the need to allocate the customer’s resources and staff to the task. The software imports the newly translated terms into the original drawing, in the correct position and, if necessary, adjusting the font to suit the new language (Cyrillic alphabet, Chinese ideograms, Arabic left-to-right scripts, etc.).  

This process drastically reduces translation costs and production times, while maintaining high levels of quality. 

In this way, all fonts, characteristics and other editorial choices that typify the original drawing are maintained.

This solution allows us to translate CAD and AutoCAD drawings in all the leading languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, etc.

Furthermore, the system optimises the management of fonts and language codes, through the use of both AutoCAD and Windows fonts.

Finally, we possess the IT tools required to calculate the number of words to be translated within drawings, split by new and repeated words (within one or more drawings of the entire project). This analysis is carried out free of charge by our commercial office as part of our quote.

DWG and AutoCAD are Autodesk registered trademarks.