Energy
Keeping a Korean Battery Plant Commissioning on Schedule, One Day at a Time
An EPC firm ramping up a battery cell plant in the American South needed Korean commissioning documents in English every morning, and English responses back in Korean the same day. Over 4 months, Techniwords moved 45,000 words in both directions without a single documentation delay reaching the schedule.
Korean to English and English to Korean handled by the same linguists, so terminology never drifted between the two flows.
Anything under a defined length came back within one business day, timed around the Korea and US workdays.
Electrochemistry and automation terms were logged, validated, and shared as they surfaced, week after week.
The project: a cell plant, an EPC, and a Korean equipment supplier
Identifying details in this case study have been changed to respect a client confidentiality agreement. The volumes, cadence, and process are representative of the actual engagement.
The client is an engineering, procurement, and construction firm overseeing the ramp-up of a battery cell manufacturing plant in the southern United States. The production equipment came from a Korean supplier whose commissioning engineers worked partly on site and partly from Korea. Every day produced paper: commissioning procedures, test run reports, punch lists, process safety sheets. Most of it originated in Korean. The EPC's American engineers and the plant's future operations team needed it in English, and their questions, redlines, and sign-offs had to travel back to Korea in Korean.
This was never going to be a single large translation project. It was a stream, and the stream had to run for 4 months without clogging.
The challenge: a daily two-way document flow across a 14-hour gap
Three things made the engagement demanding.
- The flow was bidirectional and constant. A test report translated into English on Tuesday would generate English comments that had to reach the Korean team, in Korean, before their Wednesday shift. A slow turnaround in either direction stalled both sides.
- The vocabulary sat at the junction of two fields. Electrode coating, formation, and cell aging terminology on one side; PLC logic, interlocks, and SCADA alarm text on the other. A translator fluent in one and vague in the other would have produced expensive misunderstandings.
- Korea and the US South share almost no working hours. With a 14-hour gap, a missed handoff did not cost hours. It cost a full day.
How we set it up
Ji-hoon Park anchored the account. His background fit the project unusually well: a BS in Electronic Engineering from KAIST, 13 years translating for the semiconductor, battery, and ESS sectors, and years spent inside a Korean equipment manufacturer before that. He worked with a second Korean linguist as a fixed pair, each reviewing the other's output, so the independent revision required by our ISO 17100-compliant process never added a bottleneck.
The logistics were deliberately boring. We agreed on a fixed daily delivery window that landed at the start of the US workday and the end of the Korean one, so both teams opened their inboxes to finished documents rather than pending ones. Short documents carried a 24-hour SLA. Longer procedure sets were scheduled against the commissioning plan, the same way we handle standing engagements in commissioning report translation generally: predictable slots, no surprises.
Terminology was treated as a living asset instead of a one-time deliverable. Every new term that surfaced in a test report went into a shared termbase with its validated Korean and English forms, visible to both the EPC and the supplier. When the supplier's engineers and the EPC's engineers disagreed on a rendering, the termbase recorded the decision, and it stuck. By month two, queries about vocabulary had nearly disappeared.
Key numbers. A snapshot of the engagement as the client's project office tracked it.
| Metric | Detail |
|---|---|
| Volume | 45,000 words over the engagement |
| Language pairs | Korean into English and English into Korean, in parallel |
| Duration | 4 months of continuous daily flow |
| Turnaround | 24-hour SLA on short documents, fixed daily delivery window |
| Deliverables | Commissioning procedures, test run reports, process safety sheets, shared termbase |
The result
Over 4 months of commissioning, no delay was attributed to documentation. Test reports arrived in English before the morning coordination call. Korean responses reached the supplier before their day started. The commissioning manager stopped listing translation as a risk item after the first month, which is the outcome we care about most: becoming invisible in the schedule.
When the plant moved from commissioning into production, the client extended the contract to cover the operations phase, including operator-facing procedures and training material. The termbase built during commissioning became the seed for that work, and every validated term carried over at full value.
What battery projects can take from this
Gigafactory construction in the US almost always pairs American engineering teams with Korean, Japanese, or Chinese equipment suppliers, and the documentation load peaks exactly when the schedule is tightest. Our work in renewable energy translation keeps showing the same pattern: the projects that go smoothly are the ones that set up a translation cadence before commissioning starts, instead of firing over urgent files one crisis at a time.
The linguistic overlap with electronics and semiconductor manufacturing also matters. Cleanroom protocols, equipment qualification, and alarm text follow conventions that a generalist Korean translator has simply never met. If your plant, EPC, or supplier is heading into a similar ramp-up, our Korean technical translation services can run the same daily setup for you. Tell us about your project and you will have an itemized quote, including a proposed delivery cadence, within one business hour.
Questions about this engagement
How do you manage translation across the Korea-US time difference?
We turn the 14-hour gap into an asset. Documents sent at the end of the US day are translated during Korean working hours and delivered before the US morning, and the reverse flow works the same way. On this project a fixed daily delivery window meant both teams started their day with finished documents instead of open requests.
Can the same team handle both Korean to English and English to Korean?
Yes, and for a bidirectional project it should. We assigned a fixed pair of linguists who covered both directions and reviewed each other's work. One shared termbase governed both flows, so a term validated in a Korean test report was rendered identically when the American team's response went back to Korea.
What kinds of commissioning documents do you translate?
On this engagement: commissioning and startup procedures, test run reports, punch lists, and process safety sheets. More broadly we handle FAT and SAT protocols, IQ/OQ/PQ documentation, alarm and interlock descriptions, and handover dossiers, always with independent revision by a second linguist before delivery.
Do you offer ongoing arrangements instead of one-off projects?
Yes. For multi-month projects we set a delivery cadence, a turnaround SLA by document length, and a standing team that keeps the translation memory and termbase current. Pricing stays per source word, so you pay for what actually flows through the channel each month rather than a flat retainer.