What we work on
- Operating and maintenance instructions
- Safety instructions, warnings and residual risk documentation
- Declarations of conformity and CE marking documentation
- Technical files and design documentation
- HMI and control system text
- Spare parts catalogues and service documentation
- Installation and commissioning documentation
- Operator training material
Why translation is a compliance activity here
EU machinery rules require that instructions accompany machinery in the language of the member state where it is placed on the market, and that safety information reaches the operator in a form they can use. The obligation sits on the manufacturer, and an inadequate translation is a non-conformity in the same way a missing guard is.
Check the current requirements and dates with your regulatory team before publishing anything on this page — the framework has been revised recently and the applicable dates matter.
That legal framing changes what the translation is for. It is not marketing collateral with a language variant; it is part of the evidence that the machine is safe to place on the market.
What actually goes wrong
Warnings lose their force. Machine output preserves meaning and loses modality. "Must not" becomes "should not". A prohibition becomes a recommendation. The sentence is accurate and the safety instruction is gone.
Residual risk statements get generalised. These are specific by design — they name the hazard that remains after the guarding. Language models paraphrase toward the general, which is exactly the wrong direction.
Terminology fragments across the document family. The manual, the parts catalogue, the HMI text and the service documentation each get translated well and independently, producing several defensible names for the same component. The operator searches a term from the screen in the manual and finds nothing.
HMI text has hard constraints. Character limits, fixed field widths, and strings that must match terms used in the manual. Engines translate for meaning and ignore the constraint; the error appears on the panel, not in review.
Units, tolerances and torque values. Conversion errors are silent, plausible and mechanically consequential.
What we deliver
- A maintained termbase you own, spanning the manual, the catalogue, the HMI and the service documentation, with terminology treated as a scored error category rather than a stylistic note.
- A dedicated safety-language pass covering modality, prohibitions, conditions, sequence and residual risk statements, at critical severity.
- Numerical and unit verification as a separate check.
- Length-constrained string handling for control and interface text.
- Reviewers with engineering background matched to the machinery type.
- Version-level traceability across model revisions and document updates, suitable for the technical file.
Languages where this matters most
German first, for the engineering and supplier base and because compound terminology carries the technical meaning. The full EU set where machinery is placed on multiple markets — and there the exposure is the weakest language, not the average. Chinese, Japanese and Korean for the Asian manufacturing base and for documentation flowing in both directions.