SDU is part of Lefebvre Sarrut  – a leading provider of products and services for legal and regulatory professionals in Europe. It serves lawyers, notaries, tax and customs specialists, health and safety experts, and ESG professionals.

To better serve its multidiscipline, multilingual customer base, the company needed a more streamlined and cost-effective solution for translating content into multiple languages. That’s when it teamed up with PublishOne and SNAP Innovation to implement an innovative AI translation service.

Streamlining translation into different languages

“The translation tool works well, and saves us a lot of time. If we feel something could be made easier, we discuss it in our monthly meetings with PublishOne. They’re always willing to think with us.”

• Judith van Wijk, Content Analyst, Sdu

Sdu’s range of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) products help companies operating in the EU to create ESG reports. After launching in the Netherlands, the company decided to release the content to other European markets. 

This move created two challenges for Content House Manager, Dorien de Geus, and Content Analyst, Judith van Wijk. First, a short deadline for implementation. Second, a need to translate 4 different types of content – including practice notes and tools – into 6 European languages.

 Translations take time. Doing them manually involves creating and editing content in Dutch and then sending it to translators for the English, German, Spanish, Italian, and French versions. Not only is this time-consuming, but whenever the content requires updating, human translators are needed again. This can be a slow and expensive process. 

As an existing PublishOne customer, the content was already created, managed, and published from inside PublishOne. But was it possible to auto-translate this content into multiple languages from inside the PublishOne environment? 

Robert Janoska, Project Manager at PublishOne implementation partner SNAP Innovation, had the answer – yes! Robert and the team at SNAP Innovation had already developed an AI translation service that could seamlessly integrate with PublishOne and securely auto-translate documents to over 100 different languages. 

 

Integrating AI to kick-start multi-language translations

 “At SDU we can configure PublishOne ourselves. We added some additional steps into our workflow and metadata, and tested it, following agile principles. It took about a month to set up the AI translation service with a small team who knew the content well.”

• Dorien de Geus, Content House Manager, Sdu

The implementation of the AI translation module within PublishOne coincided with the annual Software Advisory Council held in October 2023. That provided the perfect opportunity for Judith and Robert to discuss the project face-to-face. 

Working alongside Robert, Dorien, and Judith quickly configured PublishOne to facilitate the translation module. They used the Deepl translation service to produce high-quality translations of the content. Testing began in early October and in a matter of weeks, the AI translation tool was being used in a production workflow. 

Adding a couple of steps to an existing publishing workflow, SDU now uses the AI module to ‘kick-start’ the translation process, carrying out the bulk of the heavy lifting before content is ready for human editing. It also maintains a glossary of terms that the AI can learn from so that key terminology is correctly translated into different languages. 

By integrating the AI translation service within PublishOne, SDU is now able to update content once – in Dutch or any other language– and push the updates through to different language versions. That’s possible because the structure of the original content acts as a template for different other language versions.   

 

Going further with AI translation services

To date, the project has yielded multiple websites with the same content in different languages. It’s a big project involving lots of moving parts – including the frontend development and other related modules. PublishOne is used for the backend content management, handling the content creation, management, and publication. 

There’s an exciting future ahead for Sdu, SNAP Innovation, and PublishOne. So far, the benefits are clear:

• More efficient translation processes
• Fewer hours spent on translation
• Cost-savings in updating and translating content

 

To discover more about integrating AI translation services with PublishOne, watch this handy explainer video: