Alfa Laval: Technical translations for a global manufacturer

Learn how Alfa Laval’s long-term partnership Acolad helps them to fulfill their global marketing and sales needs for multilingual technical content.


Acolad provides translation, localization and terminology services to Alfa Laval, including validation of all translations as well as maintenance of translation memories and termbases.


The Challenge

Alfa Laval was founded in Sweden in 1883 and is today a world leader within the key technology areas of heat transfer, separation and fluid handling.  This global organization in the B2B market employs over 17,000 employees in Sweden, Denmark, India, China, the US and France.

There is a vast need for translation services in this global organization with 100 sales companies around the world — a need driven by both legal requirements and marketing reasons.

AAC Global* has been a trusted translation service provider to Alfa Laval since the early 2000s when we became a global partner of Alfa Laval as a result of an RFP.  This resulted in long-term collaboration where Acolad today provides technical translations into 28 languages.

*AAC Global AB is part of Acolad Group, and uses Acolad brand name in marketing.

The Solution

Watch the video to learn about Alfa Laval’s experiences of collaborating with long-term partner Acolad as a supplier of technical translations to fulfill the language service needs of their global sales companies.

Why Acolad?

The worldwide organization Alfa Laval helps customers in nearly 100 countries to optimize their processes, with major production units in Europe, Asia, the US and Latin America.

Acolad provides translation, localization and terminology services to Alfa Laval, including validation of all translations as well as maintenance of translation memories and termbases. Acolad provides translation of product leaflets into 14 languages and instruction manuals into 28 different languages, as well as instruction manuals and user guides.

The localization aspect is also important since Alfa Laval has a great online presence that forms a growing part of their company. They believe translating web content into local languages is very important part of giving the clients a good experience.

Continuous development

Since the collaboration first started in the early 2000s, the contract has been extended every year, and Acolad has been working with all departments within Alfa Laval. During some periods, Acolad has been the sole supplier of language services, whereas we are now one of three suppliers. However, Acolad has remained the preferred supplier for many of the business units. Over the years, Acolad has participated in developing the processes and tools. When Alfa Laval introduced a translation management system, Acolad helped introduce it by participating in the testing phase and assisted in getting it working. Acolad has also taken part in refining the process of proofreading and validation to perfection. There is an ongoing dialogue about how the terminology management can be improved even further, to facilitate the validation phase.  

In all of these aspects, Acolad has proven time and time again that we are able to cater to the needs of a truly global company like Alfa Laval, and we are looking forward to many exciting projects during the years to come. There are several energy efficiency projects in the pipeline, with solar panels, energy management solutions and waste water treatments. The world is increasingly focused on saving energy and protecting the environment, and there is no doubt that Alfa Laval is committed to those goals!

The Result

Acolad provides translation, localization and terminology services to Alfa Laval, including validation of all translations as well as maintenance of translation memories and termbases.

Acolad also provides translation of product leaflets into 14 languages and instruction manuals into 28 different languages, as well as instruction manuals and user guides.

“Acolad acts with speed, they have the quality sense and they are competitive with price – those are the three aspects that I am looking for in a partner."

Magnus Roth
Group Category Manager, Alfa Laval

“We have found a proofreading process with Acolad that is working very well, and we feel confident that we will get the help we need in this quite complicated procedure.."

Göran Lenz
Technical Documentation Engineer, Alfa Laval

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