Multilingual Document Control - How are other companies handling control?

J

Jgryn

#1
Dear Covers:

Our company's corporate language is english. Besides that point I do have facilities in Mexico where english is not read/spoken by all personnel. I know I need to have translations of certain documents and procedures and for lower level work instructions and facility specific documents this is okay. But the translations I have for upper level procedures and processes are a mess. How are other companies handling Multilingual Document Control?

Is it better to have two languages in one document or to have two separate language documents?

Thanks for the help!

Jen
 
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#2
Jgryn said:
Is it better to have two languages in one document or to have two separate language documents?
Hey Jen. I know that problem.

We are located in Sweden, our owners are Finnish, the corporate language is English and a fair part of our workforce have Finnish ancestry. Well, you get the picture...:lol:

Our Written procedures are in Swedish only... Except for the manual: We have one Swedish and one English version. I am deeply grateful that nobody requested a Finnish version, because I don't understand a word of it.

I found two similar threads. Have a peek:
Non English Speaking Operators - Bi-lingual lead people? Suggestions?
Bilingual Documentation

/Claes
 

Wes Bucey

Quite Involved in Discussions
#3
Claes Gefvenberg said:
Hey Jen. I know that problem.

We are located in Sweden, our owners are Finnish, the corporate language is English and a fair part of our workforce have Finnish ancestry. Well, you get the picture...:lol:

Our Written procedures are in Swedish only... Except for the manual: We have one Swedish and one English version. I am deeply grateful that nobody requested a Finnish version, because I don't understand a word of it.

I found two similar threads. Have a peek:
Non English Speaking Operators - Bi-lingual lead people? Suggestions?
Bilingual Documentation

/Claes
Let me address this from a Document Management standpoint.

Recognize that no document in your organization is "exclusively" for one language or another. Every document is for the entire organization, regardless whether everyone in the organization reads every document. (How many company bookkeepers read Work Instructions for an engine lathe?)

Thus said, the organization needs a mechanism where every document which may be translated from the organization's official language is automatically updated when the official language version is updated. The simplest way to do this is to keep the master copy together with translations and adapt the process of modifying the original official language document to include an approval process for the translations into various languages the organization may use.

It is not an "instant" process to convert all legacy documents into this system, but it is important to be consistent.

A very simple analogy is the multilingual labeling used on products sold simultaneously in French speaking Canada, English speaking Canada and USA, and Spanish speaking Mexico, Central, and South America, as well as Portugese speaking Brazil. The label or instruction book frequently contains ALL languages. Similarly, in-house organization documents should all be created in the official organization language and the various translations necessary to suit the organization and the revision levels kept the same.

Thus,
  1. Work Instruction for Running an Engine Lathe would be created in the organization's official language (for instance, Urdu.)
  2. Then, prior to release, translations of the document would be created in the languages required.
  3. Finally, Original and translations are issued under the same document number (the translations are addenda.)
If, as is probable, a translation slipup is found, its severity and effect on the document is determined whether to let it wait until the next revision of the original for fixing or to issue a new revision to cover the translation error.

This is similar to dealing with minor spelling and typographical errors in any documents.
I have seen blueprints approved by FAA and the products are flying where the description says
  • "ariospce" instead of "aerospace"
whereas
  • saying "inch" when you mean "centimeter" will bring everything to a halt until the document is corrected and everyone notified.
 
R

RosieA

#5
Hi Jen,
I have the same situation. We transfer our documentation to our Mexico site and they assign as "translation date" and adds it to the rev level. For shorter documents they have the Spanish passage right below the English, so it can be followed along in both languages. We try to use more pictures than words for the work instructions used by operators to make the need for translation minimal.
Best,
Rosie
 

Govind

Super Moderator
Staff member
Super Moderator
#6
We have similar situation as well. We transfer our products to China. The English documentation is transferred along with the Product and processes. Once the new document/Process owners are identified offshore, they take responsibility for the revisions from that point forward. Documentation will be translated and have both English and Mandarin side by side.

Another related story from the past:
Typically organizations cannot afford to hire Translation professionals to Translate hundreds and thousands of documents. So we get this done through some engineers who happen to be fluent in both languages (Relatively!) Since these engineers are not professional translation personnel, we ran into issues like the translated document conveying a totally new meaning from the original English document.

So we set up a method to measure the Translation Quality and sampled few documents. By analyzing the results,We were able to identify that the "lost in translation" issues were mainly due to lack of understanding of the process.

We finally changed our transfer process to : first train the Engineer with the original document step by step and ask the same person to translate. This reduced the amount of translation errors.

Govind.
 
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