The Cardiology and Monitoring Systems Division within the Philips Medical Systems develops patient monitoring equipment to be used in Operating Rooms, Intensive Care Units and general wards. The monitor software is localized to 17 languages, including Asian languages and Eastern Europe ones. The translation tool used for this purpose was an in-house developed tool, being DOS based and using proprietatory character coding schemes like Roman-8, HP-JIS16, etc.

With the development of a new generation of patient monitors we decided to replace after 12 years our venerable translation tool. After evaluation several products, we decided that Alchemy Software Development offered the best all-round solution. We made the strategic decision to adopt the industry standard and introduced Alchemy CATATLYST within our engineering and translation teams worldwide.

Working together with the development team from Alchemy Software (Dublin/Irland) we converted our internal file format over to an XLIFF derived format. At the same time Alchemy developed for us a custom translation environment ("Custom Editor") using the Alchemy CATALYST SDK which enables our translators to translate our medical device on the MS Windows platforms in a WYSIWYG environment. This Custom Editor covers SBCS as well as DBCS languages and keeps the best of those user interface aspects our translators very much appreciated on the old translation tool.

The overall NLS process had to be adapted to the CATALYST translation tool. At the same time the language verification process used in our division was enhanced by linking Catalyst to the localized target environment (the patient monitor) allowing the translator to browse through the items from the Catalyst navigation menu and at the same time viewing the selected text string in the target localized environment.

The paper concludes with a list of learned experiences and contains as an outlook some further directions of development in the area of language verification within the localized target environment.