Luxury Automotive Owner Manuals

Challenges:

As this was an update project, I had to work with a large volume of legacy translations. Two major issues quickly surfaced. First, the brand name itself had been mistranslated, undermining the aura of exclusivity and risking confusion with counterfeit products. Second, many passages reflected Simplified Chinese conventions, which in the Traditional Chinese market resulted in typos and even semantic errors. For example, the term driver had been rendered as “professional chauffeur”. This inaccurate choice not only caused misunderstanding but also conveyed disrespect to the owner of a luxury vehicle. These small errors might weaken customer trust, dilute brand prestige, and most importantly, signal a lack of respect for the discerning clientele.

My contribution:

I raised these issues with the project manager and brand team, who welcomed the proposed corrections. I established a continuously updated correction glossary and integrated incremental fixes into each new update cycle. This approach balanced cost efficiency with the need to elevate quality, ensuring the manuals consistently reflected the brand’s values and showed proper respect for its customers.