For your situation, I would suggest looking into DeepL Pro Advanced. In my experience over the years, generic AI always messes up technical specs, but DeepL is basically the king of accuracy for engineering docs. It preserves your original formatting perfectly and has a glossary feature so it wont hallucinate terms. Honestly, it's pretty solid for 10+ languages. I'm kinda new to the newest API features tho, but the desktop version is seriously good!!

ngl i've been through this exact nightmare with engineering docs too... it's literally the worst when the AI thinks a tolerance spec is just a suggestion haha. for your situation, i'd look into Smartcat Language Delivery Platform or maybe Phrase Localization Platform. i mean, both are kinda pricey but they handle the technical stuff way better than basic tools cuz they have built-in glossary management. Smartcat is cool cuz it lets you pay per word which is better for long-term budget imo, but Phrase is basically the king for complex formatting... so yeah, good luck!

sooo i've been thinking about your question for a few hours now and honestly... i'd actually suggest a different approach than just jumping into those high-end enterprise platforms mentioned earlier. like, i get why people suggest them, but as someone who's still kinda new to this and super worried about safety, those big bills are scary!!

respectfully, i'd consider another option because i had a really disappointing experience where a 'premium' tool messed up a safety tolerance and it almost cost us a prototype. not as good as expected at all... plus, the costs for those platforms are literally insane for a smaller team.

if you're on a budget but need to be SAFE, have you looked into Lilt Managed Services or even the basic tier of Matecat? matecat is actually free and open-source for some stuff, which is a huge lifesaver. honestly, for technical specs, i've found that using a cheaper tool like Redokun (which is way more affordable, starting around $150/month) combined with a quick manual check by a freelancer is way safer than trusting an AI to not hallucinate a decimal point. i mean, engineering docs are high-stakes, you know? i'd rather save money on the software and spend it on a human 'sanity check' to make sure nothing blows up lol. basically, dont trust the AI alone with specs!! have you tried a hybrid workflow yet? gl!

Good to know!

Just sharing my experience: I went through this exact headache last year when our team had to localize 500+ pages of HVAC manuals. I tried the DeepL Pro Advanced mentioned above, and while it's solid, the costs stacked up fast for our volume. To save some cash, I actually messed around with the Google Cloud Translation API using their AutoML Translation feature.

It took a bit of technical setup, but honestly, it was way cheaper in the long run. I think it's like $20 per million characters after the free tier? The trick for me was uploading our own .tmx files—basically just a list of our specific engineering terms—so the AI wouldn't hallucinate "bolt" for "screw" lol. It kinda saved us thousands compared to a full agency. But yeah, you gotta watch the formatting, sometimes the tags get wonky if the source PDF is messy.

TL;DR: Used Google Cloud AutoML Translation with custom glossaries to keep costs low while maintaining technical accuracy. Gl!

Helpful thread 👍

Re: "Good to know!" - yeah it really is, though honestly i have had such a disappointing run with these translation tools over the years. I spent forever trying to digitize and translate my grandpas old ham radio manuals from the 50s and every single platform i tried just completely butchered the technical specs... it was so frustrating because i wanted to preserve them for the community but the accuracy was just not as good as expected. It actually reminds me of when i tried to restore the housing on one of those old Zeniths. I spent like three weeks in my garage sanding down the walnut veneer only to realize i used the wrong grit and totally ruined the finish. I ended up getting so distracted that i started building a birdhouse instead using the leftover wood. The birds seem to like it though! I even put a little solar light on top so they can find it at night, which led to me falling down a rabbit hole of outdoor lighting setups for the whole backyard. Anyway lol sorry kinda went off topic there... just thinking about how hard it is to get things perfect.

To add to the point above: it looks like everyone has already covered the big names like DeepL and Smartcat. Late to the party but honestly, if you're doing high-stakes engineering manuals where a single decimal point matters, I would suggest being really careful with pure AI workflows. I've seen teams trust the output only to find out the machine swapped 'diameter' for 'radius' halfway through... it's a nightmare. Since you need performance and accuracy across 10+ languages, you might want to consider these more robust setups:

• RWS Trados Studio 2022 Professional is basically the industry gold standard for complex manuals and handles formatting better than basically anything else.
• MemoQ Project Manager has incredible glossary management that is way more reliable than standard LLM hallucinations.
• ModernMT Enterprise is cool because it actually learns from your corrections in real-time which helps with consistency. Make sure to run a small pilot first tho. No matter how good the AI claims to be, I would still suggest having a technical editor spot-check the specs because safety is just too important to leave to chance. Feel free to reach out if you need help figuring out the terminology databases!

honestly, finding an ai that doesnt mess up technical specs is still a massive headache even after all these years. ive spent way too long trying to get these platforms to play nice with engineering documentation, and unfortunately, the results are usually not as good as expected when you factor in file compatibility. most of them just choke on specialized xml or cad-derived text.

• Wordfast Pro 9 is decent for maintaining formatting across multiple languages, but unfortunately the cloud sync is a bit buggy and it feels clunky.
• Lokalise Enterprise Translation is much smoother for team collaboration, though it still hallucinates specific industrial terms if you dont have a massive glossary already uploaded. it sucks. we still cant fully trust these things with a decimal point or a tolerance spec... i always end up having to do a manual pass anyway because the risk of a hallucination is just too high for safety manuals.