What we work on
- Service and repair documentation
- Diagnostic systems and fault code text
- Owner manuals and in-vehicle text
- Parts catalogues and technical illustrations
- Infotainment and HMI strings
- Homologation and type approval documentation
- Supplier technical specifications
- Training material for technicians
Why this sector breaks machine translation
Not sentence by sentence. Set by set.
The unit of quality is the document family, not the document. A machine translates each file competently and independently — and produces three defensible names for the same component across the manual, the diagnostic strings and the parts catalogue. Every individual file passes review. The set is broken. A technician orders the wrong part, or searches a term that returns nothing, and the cost lands somewhere nobody traces back to translation.
Diagnostic and interface text has hard constraints. Character limits, fixed field widths, strings that appear in a display and must match a term in a manual. Engines translate for meaning and ignore the constraint, and the error only appears on the device.
Safety content is embedded in routine content. Warnings and torque values sit inside long procedural documents where a reviewer's attention is thinnest. Numerical errors and unit conversions are the ones to catch, and they are invisible to a fluency read.
Documentation lives for a decade or more. Terminology decided badly in year one is expensive to correct in year six and impossible to correct in the field.
What we deliver
- A maintained termbase you own, with terminology treated as a named, severity-scored error category rather than a stylistic remark.
- Consistency findings reported at family level, across documents rather than within them — which is where the problem actually lives.
- Scoring against J2450 as well as MQM, for clients who already run the automotive metric.
- Constraint checking for length-limited diagnostic and interface strings.
- Reviewers with automotive engineering background, not generalists working from a glossary.
- A version trail across model years and document revisions.
Languages where this matters most
German, for the DACH engineering and supplier base, and because compound terminology is where technical meaning is carried. Japanese and Korean, for the Asian manufacturing base and for the honorific and register decisions that machine output gets wrong in customer-facing text. Chinese, for the largest vehicle market in the world. And the European set, where volume is high, engines look adequate, and consistency quietly degrades.