Case study: How Firebirds Wood Fired Grill translated 25 eLearning Courses in three months
With the help of Smartcat’s instant AI translations and marketplace of professional, subject matter expert reviewers, Firebirds Wood Fired Grill translated 25 extensive courses in just three months.
Achieved results
$0.05
average
price per word
3.2x
more content
for the same total cost
25
courses translated
in three months
In the food and beverage industry, training staff is crucial to ensure high standards of service and health and safety. 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. These materials are also translated into Spanish to accommodate native Spanish speakers on the team.
With the help of Smartcat’s instant AI translations and marketplace of professional, subject matter expert reviewers, they translated 25 extensive courses in just 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’s simple-to-use, enterprise language AI platform.
The Challenge
Before coming to Smartcat, Firebirds Wood Fired Grill had wanted to translate much of their learning and development (L&D) courses, training materials, and other types of corporate material into Spanish, but weren't sure how to go about it.
Tammy Calhoun
Vice President of Learning and New Restaurant Openings at Firebirds Wood Fired Grill
Accuracy in the target language was essential
Given the importance of food and hospitality health and safety, it was critical that Firebirds Wood Fired Grill achieved a highly accurate translation of their eLearning materials. Moreover, the company also had to ensure translation precision for training related to food and material items, recipes, and cooking instructions for their restaurant teams.
A high volume of course content to translate
Another key challenge was the large amount of content for translation. For back-of-house staff training needs, the restaurant 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 years” to successfully translate all of their eLearning courses, which is an accurate assumption by traditional translation industry standards.
Translating Articulate files and videos subtitles
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’s secure and easy-to-use enterprise language AI platform. 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.
The Solution
Smartcat’s enterprise language AI platform provided an end-to-end solution that met all of the concerns and challenges that Tammy and her team were facing.
Fast turnaround times without compromising quality
Tammy and her team have been able to translate Articulate courses in as little as a few days, compared to months or even over a year with traditional translation industry processes. Smartcat AI constantly learns from their edits and preferences and automatically implements this new knowledge on each subsequent translation.
Each translation has become incrementally faster, with quality also increasing.
Subject matter expert human reviewers
With Smartcat’s industry-leading marketplace of 500,000 vetted reviewers, Tammy and her team have been able to find and hire professional reviewers with expertise in the hospitality industry all within the platform, in just a few clicks. While Smartcat’s AI translation engines do the vast majority of the translation work, Firebirds Wood Fired Grill is able to guarantee full translation precision thanks to seamless human-AI workflows and human post-translation editing.
The direct, transparent nature of Smartcat’s marketplace of reviewers means that Firebirds Wood Fired Grill have been able to grow professional relationships with a team of external reviewers, as well as train them in the company’s linguistic preferences, terminology, style, and tone of voice.
Tammy Calhoun
Vice President of Learning and New Restaurant Openings at Firebirds Wood Fired Grill
Ability to translate various file formats, including XLIFF
Articulate’s XLIFF file format can be challenging and stubborn to work with when it comes to translation. Firebirds Wood Fired Grill has been able to overcome this difficulty with Smartcat’s simple, intuitive platform, which efficiently integrates with Articulate and accurately renders XLIFF file content, layout, and formatting into the target language.
Tammy’s team has also taken advantage of Smartcat’s ability to manage over 80 other file formats, including PDF, video, Doc, and others, for other kinds of translation needs.
Conducive to optimal collaboration
The Firebirds Wood Fired Grill translation team all work within one workspace on the Smartcat platform. They are also able to invite professional reviewers from the Smartcat Marketplace on the platform to join their workspace. Here, they can define and assign translation workflow steps, view work stage progress, and discuss the projects directly on the platform, including with their invited reviewers.
The Outcome
Firebirds Wood Fired Grill was able to implement a streamlined AI-human 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 seamless, highly collaborative workflow across their translation team, with everyone working within Smartcat’s enterprise language AI platform.
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 as they would have spent with a traditional translation service provider. This was a key component of the team being able to scale their eLearning content to 25 courses in just three months.
Tammy Calhoun
Vice President of Learning and New Restaurant Openings at Firebirds Wood Fired Grill