Real engagements — real volume, real timelines, real outcomes. Engagement details anonymised where client confidentiality requires.
An EN-US to ZH-CN OCR review job arrived as a 434-page Clinical Trial Agreement bundle — fifteen separate document parts including medical records, hospitalisation reports, and expert assessments, several with French source material. The client's translation pipeline needed clean, structured English text before the Chinese conversion could begin. The catch: ABBYY FineReader could not extract the content cleanly. Pages were blurry. Tables were split across cells. Special characters came through as junk. Some pages were partly handwritten. Both portrait and landscape orientations sat inside the same file. The original deadline gave us 48 hours.
First, we said no — honestly. The original timeline wasn't deliverable at the quality the client needed, and splitting the work across uncoordinated operators would have broken table continuity. We documented the file complexity, negotiated a workable deadline, and committed to it. Then we ran the operation: tried multiple OCR engines on each problem page (ABBYY and alternatives), and on every page where OCR fell short, switched to manual key-and-verify, line by line. Operators zoomed in to read minute text. Split tables were reconstructed cell by cell. Handwritten passages were transcribed by hand. The project manager stayed on email with the client every day — not just on milestones, but on the daily state of the file.
Thank you for your prompt delivery of the file and for keeping me updated throughout the process. This is much appreciated, especially considering the complexity involved and the tight timelines we had to manage. Your efforts and dedication to finding workable solutions have been invaluable to the project.
Senior Project Manager · Language Solutions division · PhilippinesA major academic publisher needed high-volume STM journal composition — including complex MathML equations, chemistry structures, and multi-language scripts — at a 48-hour standard TAT, with simultaneous JATS XML and print PDF output, and WCAG AA EPUB 3 production for digital distribution.
Dedicated compositor team with specialist STM training. XML-first workflow producing simultaneous JATS XML and print-ready PDF from a single source. EPUB 3 with MathML, accessible alt text, and EPUBCheck 5.1.0 validation. IDML-based AI pre-check running on every file before operator involvement.
A European LSP won a contract to localise a pharmaceutical patient information leaflet into 22 languages — including Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), and 17 European languages. Previous attempts at Arabic and Hebrew had resulted in font failures, kashida handling errors, and bidirectional text issues that required full rework.
B2K ran font compatibility checks across all 22 languages before translation began, flagging font gaps and recommending replacements. XLIFF round-trip with TransTools tag cleaning for all 22 files. RTL specialists handled Arabic and Hebrew layouts including kashida, tatweel, and bidirectional text. Layout space prediction ran on all language pairs before translation to pre-solve text expansion issues.