Case study: How Firebirds Wood Fired Grill translated 25 eLearning Courses in three months

In the Food and Beverage industry, training staff is crucial to ensure the service level, as well as health and safety, remain at high levels. Firebirds Wood Fired Grill – a polished, yet casual American restaurant with a new twist on the traditional grill – understands the value of well-trained staff. Based in Charlotte, North Carolina, they provide a wide range of training materials for their staff. They also decided to translate this body of training materials into Spanish to accommodate the predominance of this language among their staff.

With the help of Smartcat’s instant AI translations and Marketplace of professional, subject matter expert linguists, they translated 25 extensive courses in a matter of three months.

We sat down with Tammy Calhoun, Vice President of Learning and New Restaurant Openings at  Firebirds Wood Fired Grill to discuss the restaurant group’s translation journey and results with Smartcat.

Before coming to Smartcat, Firebirds Wood Fired Grill had wanted to translate much of their learning and development courses, training materials, and other types of corporate material into Spanish, but weren't sure how to go about it.

Given the importance of food and hospitality health and safety, it was critical that Firebirds Wood Fired Grill achieve a highly accurate translation of their eLearning materials. Moreover, the company also had to ensure translation precision for training in food and materials stock, recipes, and cooking instructions for their restaurant teams.

Another key challenge was a large amount of content for translation. For back-of-house staff training needs, the restaurant concept wanted to translate the following from English into Spanish:

• 25 eLearning courses

• station manuals

• job aids

• build sheets

Before Smartcat, Tammy and her team estimated that it could “take us years” to successfully translate all of their eLearning courses, which is actually an accurate assumption by traditional translation industry standards.

Firebirds Wood Fired Grill creates their courses in Articulate, so finding a translation service provider that could translate XLIFF files accurately and efficiently was another stumbling block.

The company also wanted to be able to meet ad-hoc translation needs, such as for video subtitling, so a translation platform that could handle different file formats was important.

Very soon, this led to the Firebirds Wood Fired Grill team finding Smartcat. After trying out the platform's demo account with 100,000 free AI translation words, the company purchased a license and set about translating their entire back-of-house eLearning course catalog.

Firebirds Wood Fired Grill was able to define a streamlined translation workflow in the first three months with Smartcat. During this time the company successfully translated 25 Articulate courses into Spanish.

The company now has a highly streamlined, collaborative workflow across their translation team, with everyone working within the same Smartcat digital workspace.

In terms of cost, Firebirds Wood Fired Grill achieves a per-word-average price of $0.05 compared to the industry average of $0.16. This cost-saving has enabled Tammy and her team to translate 3.2 times more content for the same total cost with a traditional translation service provider, which was a key catalyst in being able to scale their eLearning content to 25 courses in just three months.