A team that doesn't share a language
On today's construction sites, it is rare for everyone to speak the same language. The site manager is Croatian or German, and the crew includes workers from Turkey, Uzbekistan or China. The same is true of many offices, warehouses and production floors.
Face to face, people manage: they point, sketch, or someone translates. The problem starts when information has to travel in writing:
- tomorrow's instructions sent in a chat,
- a note someone in the field attached to a site,
- a health and safety document everyone has to read,
- an announcement to the whole company on the notice board.
Then everyone translates on their own, usually by copying text into some app on their personal phone. Or nobody translates, and people guess. Both cost something: time, work that has to be redone, and on a construction site sometimes safety.
Translation where the text already is
Office Assistant and Constructis can now translate content inside the system itself:
- records — notes and entries attached to sites, tasks and other registers,
- documents — instructions, policies and announcements,
- chat messages — conversations between the office and the field, and within teams.
Everyone can read in a language they understand, and the text stays where it belongs: with the site, the document or the conversation, not in someone's private translation app.
What it looks like in practice
A site manager writes to the crew in Croatian:
Sutra u 7 betoniramo ploču na 2. katu. Molim da se danas provjeri oplata.A worker who is more at home in Turkish reads it like this:
Yarın saat 7'de 2. kattaki döşemeyi betonlayacağız. Lütfen kalıbı bugün kontrol edin.In English: "We are pouring the 2nd floor slab tomorrow at 7. Please check the formwork today." When the worker replies in Turkish, the manager reads the reply in Croatian. The same applies to a note attached to a site, or to a document the whole team needs to read.
Supported languages
The system currently translates into seven languages:
- Croatian,
- English,
- German,
- Turkish,
- Italian,
- Chinese,
- Uzbek.
We added Turkish because of the construction industry in Germany, where a large share of the workforce is Turkish-speaking. A German contractor can talk to the crew on site through the same system in which they already track hours, costs and documentation.
What translation does not replace
Machine translation helps people understand a message, but it is not a certified translation. Contracts, official instructions and mandatory health and safety training are still subject to the rules the law sets out. Translation in the system is there so that everyday communication does not get stuck on language, not to replace those documents.
Want to see it in action?
Translation is available in Constructis, our system for construction companies, and in Office Assistant. If your team works across several languages, get in touch and we will show it to you on your own example.