AL-KO Gained Full Oversight with a Centralised Translation Workflow
About AL-KO
Since 1931, AL-KO Vehicle Technology has supplied components and systems to the transport industry. What began as a forging shop grew into one of the sector’s leading manufacturers. The company’s work is guided by the same values it started with: quality, precision, safety, and comfort. AL-KO now delivers axles and chassis components to major manufacturers around the world.
The brief
AL-KO needed a more structured way to manage multilingual content across its departments. The company produces manuals, product descriptions, website copy, brochures, and technical documentation. Each department had been organising its own translation work, often with different providers. This created several challenges:
- no central visibility of ongoing or completed projects
- inconsistent terminology and writing style across materials
- employees spending too much time searching for updates and aligning content
- no common process for preparing or evaluating translations
AL-KO wanted one partner to coordinate all translations and a system that gave employees a clear overview of every project.
Our approach
We created a unified setup that brought all translation activity into one place.
Project setup
The first step was to make SmartDesk, our customer portal, available to all relevant AL-KO teams. This allowed staff across departments to:
- submit translation request
- track project status from start to finish
- access delivered files
- view a shared archive of past work
Alongside the platform setup, we introduced a translation memory and term base to ensure that product names, technical expressions, and recurring phrases stayed consistent across all content.
Translation workflow
Employees now upload files directly to SmartDesk. The system assigns the job, applies the correct language pairs, and shows the live progress of each project. All updates, deliveries, and confirmations stay within the portal, which removes the need for long email threads or manual tracking.
Our linguists work with the shared translation memory and term base, so approved terminology is applied across manuals, brochures, and online content. This reduces rework, speeds up translation, and improves the quality of the final text.
Efficiency and quality gains
The new workflow delivered several improvements for AL-KO:
- full transparency for all departments
- consistent terminology across every content type
- less manual coordination
- faster project turnaround
- cost savings as the translation memory grows
Employees no longer spend time correcting the same issues or searching for past versions, because all materials follow the same standards and live in the same system.
The outcome
Bianca Schmid, responsible for AL-KO’s online marketing, shared her experience:
“SmartDesk has made us much faster and more efficient as a marketing team. AdHoc Translations are very helpful and our collaboration with them is excellent. Our new term base allows us to save both time and money in the long term.”
Interested in a simpler setup for your translations?
If your teams work with several providers or manage projects manually, a centralised workflow can make day-to-day coordination easier.
Contact us to explore how your translation process could run more smoothly.
