Case Study: Office Depot achieves faster, more consistent translations across Europe with RWS

Smarter translation gives Office Depot a clear, consistent voice across Europe

Office Depot’s European web stores serve thousands of businesses and rely on a 70‑person data management team in Venlo to create product descriptions in five languages. The team’s spreadsheet‑based translation workflow was slow, error‑prone and inconsistent—translations were done from scratch for each product, review cycles were lengthy, terminology varied (for example, multiple German terms for “ballpoint pen”), and the process struggled to keep up with growing product volumes.

The team adopted SDL Trados Studio, GroupShare, MultiTerm and SDL Machine Translation and implemented a four‑step process that pre‑populates translations from centralized translation memories and termbases, uses MT suggestions, applies post‑editing, and updates shared resources in real time. The change boosted quality and consistency (TM matches for ~60% of new content), doubled manual translation speed, produced a 300% overall productivity gain (from ~25 to ~100 translations/day), cut publishing time by 70% and made translations 35% faster from MT alone.

Office Depot

Andreea Judele

Translations & Terminology Manager