Resources
White papers, case studies, guides, and checklists spanning technical documentation, translation, and localization. Practical knowledge built on 35+ years of helping global manufacturers communicate across languages.
UI Matching Check for Multilingual Manuals
The moment the manual and the product disagree, the user stops trusting the product. The manual says “press the POWER button.” The button is molded ON/OFF. The manual says the path is Settings > Wireless. The firmware says Settings > Network > Wireless. The user hunts for a menu that does not exist, then calls support.
Regulatory and Standards Marking Check for Multilingual Manuals
A multilingual manual that has cleared manual translation, technical document translation, and layout review still has one gate left. Every market where the product sells imposes its own marking obligations: safety statements, certification marks, environmental notices, accessibility declarations, data-handling disclosures.
DTP and Layout Integrity Check for Multilingual Manuals
Manual translation and technical document translation can be word-perfect, and the manual can still be unshippable. Wrong language settings, wrong line breaking, a font without glyph coverage, recto and verso pages that no longer align, table columns running the wrong direction, a leader line landing on top of the artwork: any…
Translation Integrity Check for Multilingual Manuals
Even after manual translation and technical document translation are finished, a multilingual manual still needs checking before it goes to DTP. The automated QA built into CAT tools reliably catches structured errors such as untranslated segments, missing tags, and number mismatches.
Rebuilding an Industrial Equipment Manual Safety Section for North America: From Translation to Standards-Based Redesign
A Korean industrial equipment manufacturer needed the operator's manual for its electric forklift series to hold up in North America. Its 19-page Korean safety chapter, written as a flat list of 16 items, was rebuilt as a 25-page Section 1. Safety Rules under ANSI Z535.6 and IEC/IEEE 82079-1. Translation alone could not close that gap. A translator carries over what the source says and cannot supply what it never contained, and the source had no hazard severity levels, no reasoning behind its prohibitions, and none of the hazard topics North American regulations require. Those had to be written: signal word message panels, quantified limits such as OSHA's 25 ft (7.6 m) definition of an unattended truck, and topics drawn from OSHA 29 CFR 1910.178 and ANSI/ITSDF B56.1. The six pages the chapter gained are safety information the source never had.
Content Reuse Starts with a Sentence Library
A manufacturer can build a working content reuse system without buying a component content management system. This white paper documents the standard sentence library methodology Hansem Global has run for more than 20 years inside one of the most demanding documentation environments in the world, the manual program of a global…
Manual Production Automation: Expectation and Reality
Full automation of manual production is not achievable. Most of the work in a manufacturer documentation program is derivative production, where content reuse exceeds 80%, and the real cost of multilingual publishing sits in typesetting and verification rather than in writing.
Digital Manuals Without a CCMS
You can convert product manuals into searchable, multilingual web-based manuals without first buying a component content management system. This paper documents the structure-first conversion method Hansem Global has operated for more than ten years in the manual programs of a global mobile device maker and a global automotive…