In the autumn of 2022 the Waldmann Group, a leading manufacturer of lighting systems from the Black Forest, was in the middle of planning its SAP rollout to France, Italy and Austria. They recognized early on that in-house transactions and forms that had been created in German – along with the associated Customizing texts – would have to be translated into French and possibly also into English and Italian. While searching for a translation tool, they settled on the i18n Translation Manager from LUDECKE. The LUDECKE team also conducted an initial analysis to determine the initial translation volume, provided consulting support to Waldmann’s IT team, and even handled the English translations later in the project.
Tool-Based Identification of Texts
LUDECKE started by performing an initial analysis, the purpose of which was to identify all the texts that needed to be translated into French. This was quickly accomplished using the i18n Translation Manager, which automatically identified all the texts used by the Z transactions to be used in France. All the team had to do was enter the relevant transaction codes and the tool did the rest. It was a similar story with Customizing: in this case the i18n Translation Manager searched the development system for Customizing entries created by Waldmann and extracted the associated texts.
Using the metadata provided by the tool, Waldmann’s IT team was then able to decide for each of the identified Customizing tables whether it needed to be translated or not. The application component (e.g. FI or PP) was listed to make it easy to determine who was responsible for deciding on each table. The LUDECKE team also provided a preselection of suggested texts, in which technical text tables were already excluded, for example. This work resulted in a translation scope containing all the texts to be translated. Once the PDF forms were added in the final step, the total translation volume was determined and the planning of the translation phase began. A colleague at each of the international Waldmann branches agreed to do the translations.
An Iterative Approach
On LUDECKE’s recommendation, Waldmann chose the translation editor XTM Cloud, a browser-based translation tool that is extremely easy to use and particularly friendly for beginners. But the most important factor was the option for direct API integration with i18n Translation Manager. Using the tool, the texts to be translated could be uploaded directly from the SAP system to XTM Cloud, ready for translation.
The team opted for an iterative approach to make optimal use of their capacities without committing all their resources. With this approach, small translation packages were created bit by bit and provided for translation on XTM Cloud. When translation was completed for a package, the French translations were automatically imported into the development system. They were then added to a transport request and transported to the test system. As a result, the volume of French texts available in the test system gradually increased, until finally the entire scope was translated.
Bärbel Olpp, In-House IT Consultant SAP PLM/CAx, Waldmann Group
Existing Translations – from Waldmann and from SAP
Before translation began, existing company-specific translations were exported from the legacy systems and uploaded to the translation memory in XTM. These were then provided to the translator as suggestions when editing a text that was identical or very similar to an existing translation.
SAP Translation Hub was used as another source for existing translations. Using the API provided by SAP, i18n Translation Manager retrieved translations from SAP’s Multilingual Text Repository. Each text uploaded to XTM was first checked against the SAP Translation Hub; for texts that SAP had previously translated into French, the relevant translation was retrieved and uploaded to XTM along with the source text. The translator could then check these suggested translations and use them if appropriate, which saved quite a bit of work.
All Roads Lead to Italy
Once the translations for France were finished, the next step was Italy and then the Netherlands. Waldmann quickly decided against a Dutch translation, and for Italy they decided that only forms and some Customizing tables would be provided in Italian. For the Z transactions, the company decided that the Italian employees should use the English translations. However, only a few of these texts were available in English – the majority were only in German.
Waldmann therefore commissioned LUDECKE to handle the English translations, also with the help of i18n Translation Manager and XTM Cloud. LUDECKE called on its long-standing translation partner, text&form, which delivered an English language version within five weeks. Once this was finished, the Italian and Dutch language versions could be filled out with the English texts. Now when users log in to the SAP system in Italian, SAP standard transactions are displayed in the local language, while Z transactions are shown in English.
To translate the forms and Customizing into Italian, XTM Cloud was again used with the same proven approach from the French project. A colleague from Italy translated the texts, making the test system more “Italian” with each transport. The rollout in France is now complete, and Italy has been working live with SAP since July 2023.
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