May 2009 : new terminology management application released

Cogen unveils a new terminology management application to help customers reach world markets with better accuracy and shorter timeframes.

Ensuring the quality and rapid availability of product literature is critical for manufacturers in all sectors. Cogen's new terminology management application enables all parties involved to achieve better results, and in less time, when producing multilingual documentation.

"The vast majority of issues in technical publications stem from terminology inaccuracies", says Hélène Keufgens, CEO of Cogen. "By providing translators and reviewers with a powerful tool to ensure the right terminology is used in the right place at the right time, Cogen helps make product literature more understandable to the end user. As a result, companies can get products to market faster, and their competitive advantage is increased by the quality of the accompanying manuals".

One of the challenges faced by global manufacturing companies is to have a structured, centralised approach to terminology. Whatever the existing situation, Cogen can provide guidance to create, enhance and maintain a multilingual glossary.

Cogen integrates such customer glossaries as an extra layer into its translation memory leveraging process. In the files sent out for translation and review, all terms in the source language found in the glossary are highlighted and their preferred translations provided. This ensures that translators and reviewers consistently employ the same term for the same concept, enabling them to work faster and more accurately.

"Our translation memory leveraging technology already helps achieve cost and time efficiencies. Our new tool adds to these efficiencies and further enhances quality by focussing specifically on ensuring terminology consistency", Keufgens explains.

For manufacturers faced with the double challenge of reducing time to market and providing high-quality multilingual technical literature to their customers, Cogen's new terminology management application makes a substantial difference.

"We have invested in this application based on our extensive experience of working with leading global manufacturers and have seen pilot deployments with existing clients quickly prove the additional value of our new tool", she concludes.


Cogen is an ISO 9001:2008 certified language service provider, serving customers in the US, Europe and Asia since 1980. 
Our mission is to help manufacturers of industrial equipment, medical devices and complex consumer products to create more product documentation, in more languages, within controlled, repeatable and metrics-driven processes that quarantee quality, consistency, cost containment and a shorter delivery timeframe.

Cogen offers international project managment services, consultancy in translation process optimisation, glossary management, translation and multilingual publishing services.


For further information, please contact:

Jean Mandron, Business Development Manager
(+33 1 46 91 89 14, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Hélène Keufgens, CEO
(+32 6789 2514, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

April 2009 : Cogen uses Levenshtein algorithm to calculate fuzzy matching

Fuzzy matching is a popular method for leveraging content from a translation memory, where matches are less than 100% perfect, ie. are not "full matches".

Cogen has now re-written its fuzzy matching algorithm to incorporate the edit distance measurement as defined by Russian scientist Vladimir Levenshtein. The Levenshtein distance is a metric used for measuring the difference between two sequences (ie. the "edit distance"). It is often used in applications that need to determine how similar, or different, two character strings are - such as spell checkers.

In the application of Translation Memory, the Levenshtein algorithm offers some major advantages:

It is rigorously precise in calculating the matching percentage. In our algorithm, the "fuzziness" treshold is set at 60%: as soon as 60% of the content matches, two segments are considered to have a fuzzy match, which reduces the translation fee by 50%. Consequently, the translation fees for fuzzy matches are more economical than the translation industry's commonly used standard.

The algorithm is perfectly suited to logographic writing systems such as Chinese and Japanese.

It increases translation memory reuse, reducing the translation turnaround time, and improving the translation quality.

To receive a copy of Cogen's white paper on the Levenshtein algorithm, please contact:

Jean Mandron, Business Development Manager
(+33 1 46 91 89 14, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Hélène Keufgens, CEO
(+32 6789 2514, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

July 25th, 2006 : Cogen gets ISO 9001:2000 certification

LRQA, Lloyd's Register Quality Assurance, certified Cogen's language services according to the ISO 9001:2000 standard.

Cogen's Quality Management System is built upon ten key processes, identified by Véronique Respaut, Cogen's Consultant, Quality and Language Automation, and passionate quality management evangelist :

• Language Resources, which covers the selection and training of translators, the monitoring of the quality they deliver and their timeliness, and the registration and analysis of customers' feedback,
• Customer Care, which includes the management of customers' projects, from order confirmation to delivery and archiving,
• Sales and Marketing, dealing with project costing, but also with how Cogen monitors their customers' satisfaction,
• Management, i.e. the setting of the company's long-term objectives and the measurement of the progression towards them,
• Continuous Improvement, which encourages all of Cogen's stakeholders to log improvement suggestions and complaints, and plans their follow-up through improvement actions,
• Human Resources, an important aspect of which is the evaluation of the competencies of Cogen's staff, the planning of their training and the assessment of the training's effectiveness in improving overall quality,
• ICT, which guarantees the stability, safety and continuous improvement of the technological backbone of Cogen's processes: the content filtering, language assets management, and publishing and rendering applications, but also data integrity and disaster recovery.
• Support and quality management processes : Internal Communication, Document Management and Finance and Administration.

When Cogen launched the project of certifying its Quality Management System, most of these processes were already in place, as were the performance and quality indicators that ensure meticulous monitoring of the services at key points in the workflow.

But the "ISO exercise" formalized them, and installed a Define, Measure, Analyze and Improve mechanism that will prove invaluable to sustain Cogen's ongoing effort to improve the reliability and repeatibility of its processes.

"Cogen's attention to detail and passion for consistency in processing and translation quality metrics certainly were a success factor in attaining the ISO certification", said Véronique Respaut upon receipt of the certificates.

"We are extremely proud of achieving this industry benchmark, which validates our commitment to delivering services which exceed the expectations of our customers worldwide, some of which operate in highly regulated industries, confirms Helen Keufgens, Partner.

Contact information:

Jérôme Legris : +32 6789 2504 - This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it