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Case Study: Toyota Otomotiv Sanayi Türkiye
Seven Years of Multilingual Language Services for a Global Automotive Manufacturer. From assembly machine standards to Kaizen culture — across Japanese, English, Turkish, and French.
 
Toyota Otomotiv Sanayi Türkiye A.Ş. (TMMT) operates one of Toyota's largest manufacturing facilities outside Japan, located in Adapazarı, Sakarya. The plant produces vehicles for both domestic and export markets, with direct operational and corporate ties to Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan and Toyota Motor Europe in Brussels. Managing a facility of this complexity requires continuous multilingual communication — across production floors, legal departments, HR, procurement, and executive governance — in a company whose operating language at headquarters level is Japanese.

 

▮How It Started
The engagement began in 2009 with user manuals and operational procedure documents — straightforward English to Turkish translation for production documentation. What distinguished TMMT from a typical translation client was the speed at which the scope expanded: within the first year, requests were coming in across multiple departments, in multiple language directions, covering content types that ranged from assembly machine specifications to HR training materials to corporate governance documents.

By 2010, Alafranga had become TMMT's regular language services partner — not through a formal tender, but through consistent delivery that earned repeated trust.
 
▮Scope of Work
Over seven years (2009–2016), Alafranga handled 80 assignments across every department that needed language support:
  • Technical and production documentation — assembly machine standards, user manuals, operational procedures, product supply agreements, technical assistance agreements, Liberty Reach equipment manuals, Hyperion system documentation.
  • Corporate and legal — board meeting procedures, general assembly working rules, purchasing policies, sustainability purchasing guidelines, service framework agreements, power of attorney documents, transfer pricing documentation, court decisions (Yargıtay kararı), social security documents.
  • HR and organizational culture — Hoshin Kanri training documents, workplace senior system overviews, driver and worker pattern documentation, Code of Conduct, social media policy. A dedicated interpreter was deployed on-site for a full week of training sessions — one of the few assignments in our history where a team member spent extended time embedded within a client's facility.
  • Corporate communications — Toyota Motor Corporation safety and health bulletins, press materials, key facts documents, internal notices on inward processing relief, hazardous substances communications.
  • Software localization — LLC2 software, iProc user guide (R12), Hyperion financial platform, Excel scenario files.
  • Bidirectional flow — unlike most translation relationships which run in one dominant direction, TMMT required genuine bidirectionality: EN→TR, TR→EN, JP→TR, JP→EN, TR→JP, EN→JP, FR→TR, TR→FR. At various points, a single assignment moved through multiple languages in sequence — Japanese source, English intermediary, Turkish delivery.


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