English sentences go from left to right. Arabic sentences go from right to left. It could be just a minor peculiarity if it was not increasing worker’s time when translating documents of various types (PDF or TXT docs, Presentations PPTX, Excel tables, etc) from Arabic to English and vice versa.
🏋🏻♀️ The challenge that came from a client was about reducing the time spent on such translations by automatically flipping the content.
The Discovery phase was the first one in this project. We interviewed translators and our client to dig deeper into pain points and their processes. We revealed that the majority of the translated documentation is PowerPoint presentations (around 74% of documents) and the majority of time translators spend on the manual flip of the content elements.
Since all Microsoft office documents are in general a zip-archive with the set of XML files, a custom solution has been developed. This solution allows flipping automatically the content elements during the upload of the docs for translation.
🚀 That reduced time spent on non-productive activities and revealed time for translators to concentrate on the key mission and avoid spending time on extra formatting.