Are you looking to reduce the overall cost of localization, even as you scale?
Driving down long‑term localization costs requires structured content, effective terminology management, and the ability to maximize content reuse over time. Rubric combines deep expertise in structured content and localization engineering with a pricing model that rewards your effort—working with customers to improve and optimize their source content, and ensuring the efficiency built into that content translates into real savings.
This approach unlocked long-term value for our client Watson-Marlow Fluid Technology Solutions (Watson-Marlow), which supplies pumps and related technology to industries worldwide.
Working in a highly regulated industry, Watson-Marlow is required to provide its customers with accurate, clear, and up-to-date technical documentation—which is then translated to support customers in over 40 countries. Human translation by subject matter experts is essential to maintain quality, but has the potential to be expensive.
Rubric’s reuse-driven approach helped Watson-Marlow improve quality while making significant savings on localization:
- The first full translation came in 25% cheaper than the previous supplier’s quote
- A subsequent project achieved 96% content reuse from the translation memory, dramatically cutting cost and turnaround time
The challenge (and the opportunity): Manually rebuilding technical documentation
Shortly after switching to Rubric as its localization partner, Watson-Marlow brought technical authoring back in house for its Bredel pump brand. But the company’s previous technical authoring supplier didn’t provide them with any usable working source files. Instead, they were left with thousands of individual XML fragments, with no meaningful structure or hierarchy.
The Watson-Marlow team had to manually rebuild all their technical documentation. This revealed numerous inconsistencies; much of the content could have been generic and shared across the range, but each manual had subtly different versions of text.
The team knew this was adding large unnecessary cost and maintenance burdens. However, they were concerned that restructuring and rewriting the documentation would add further significant costs, breaking many existing matches in the translation memories that Rubric inherited from the previous supplier. The risk was that a lot of content would effectively end up being translated from scratch, adding additional cost.
In reality, the rebuild created an opportunity to reduce future localization costs. The content could be re-engineered in a manner that maximized content reuse, saving time and effort for both Watson-Marlow’s technical authors and Rubric’s localization team—ultimately leading to reduced future localization costs.
The solution: Structured content and clean data maximize reuse
Recognizing the need for a more efficient, scalable process that put them in control, Watson-Marlow re-authored their Bredel manuals in MadCap Flare, using a single-source, topic-based approach. They consolidated duplicated topics, unified structure, and improved consistency, making careful use of variables, conditional text, and snippets (small blocks of reusable text).
This resulted in one set of carefully curated source files, from which Watson-Marlow were able to produce 11 different pump manuals.
Rubric’s engineers provided deep technical support, starting by expertly cleaning the inherited translation memories. The clean-up included removing redundant text and sections of coding, as well as tags that had been wrongly filtered (a common problem when LSPs lack the technical expertise to correctly filter complex file types).
Rubric then carefully prepared the documentation for translation, segmenting it cleanly, removing duplicates, and filtering out non-translatable content. Crucially, Rubric advised Watson-Marlow on the use of Do-Not-Translate conditions for elements that should remain as they are. This meant hundreds of non-linguistic elements—such as part numbers, product codes, and quantities—could be excluded from the translation job, saving significant costs and preventing the introduction of errors.
The result: Lower costs and ongoing scalability
Working in partnership and investing time in developing global-ready content created immediate savings and cut the cost of future translations. Reusable text and reliable translation memories meant accurate, consistent translations could be delivered faster, significantly reducing Watson-Marlow’s localization spend.
Initial fears that manually rebuilding the documentation would add costs proved unfounded: the first full translation of the restructured Flare content cost 25% less than the previous supplier’s quote.
The saving was achieved despite Rubric’s headline per-word rate being higher than the previous supplier's rate. This demonstrates the impact of optimizing content for localization at scale, with effective structuring and consistent terminology that facilitates reuse.
“Rubric’s quoting model, combined with our structured authoring in Flare, has helped prevent costs escalating—even after major content reconstruction.”
Additionally, by using the controlled single-source approach—and following Rubric’s advice on keeping translation memory matches and using Do-Not-Translate conditions— Watson-Marlow went on to create a new Bredel manual of more than 100 pages, in which 96% of content was reused from the translation memory. This enabled a fast turnaround and Rubric passed on the cost savings, demonstrating the long-term benefits of structured content.
“Rubric’s methodology genuinely reflects reuse and rewards good content engineering.”
How Rubric’s pricing rewards reuse
With Rubric’s quoting model, there are no hidden costs—and you won’t pay for the same translation twice.
- New content (not already in the translation memory) is charged at the full per-word rate.
- Fuzzy matches (where a similar but not identical translation exists in the translation memory) are discounted.
- There is no charge for exact matches, in-context exacts (where the whole surrounding context is the same), and internal repetitions. These can all be leveraged from the translation memory, so no translation effort is required.
Rubric’s dedication to updating translation memories and technical terminology glossaries, and maintaining their integrity, means that the more content you reuse, the less you’ll pay. Best-practice approaches to structured content, localization engineering, and translation memory usage result in less manual effort, shorter time to market, and improved ROI as you scale.
“I believe Rubric’s approach has ultimately delivered significant value to us—particularly once we moved technical authoring in‑house and rebuilt the source content.”
Taking the hassle out of in-country review
Rubric’s service doesn’t stop at translation. We also manage the full in-country review process for Watson-Marlow, significantly streamlining something that had proven an inefficient frustration in the past. Previously, Watson-Marlow had worked with multiple suppliers to review different languages, which required extensive coordination and often resulted in inconsistent quality. Rubric has the expertise to manage all markets under one roof.
“Rubric have demonstrated consistent, trusted quality across all of Watson‑Marlow’s core languages, enabling consolidation from a multi‑LSP model to a single, reliable partner. This has improved coordination, reduced internal effort, and streamlined the in‑country review process.”
Derek
Technical Communications Manager
Having the completed translations reviewed in context, by native speakers who understand both the product and the target culture, is a final quality control that enhances the user experience. Feedback from this review is used to refine translations and update memories, driving continuous improvement.
“Rubric manages and coordinates our entire in‑country review workflow today, which has been invaluable in ensuring global consistency and reviewer engagement.”
Start scaling and saving today
Is your legacy documentation difficult to work with, or trapped in a system you can’t access? Are you paying for repeat translations, or struggling to maintain accuracy and consistency across markets?
Talk to Rubric for expert guidance on optimizing your content for localization, and get a quote that rewards your efforts with savings that grow as you scale.