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 daily report the foreman writes for the site manager,
- a health and safety notice 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 now translate content inside the system themselves:
- chat — conversations between the office and the field, and within teams,
- the notice board and knowledge base — posts, polls and articles,
- site reports — in Constructis, foremen's daily reports, directors' reports, work phases and expense descriptions,
- documents — document names and descriptions, so everyone knows what is in which folder.
Everyone sees content in the language they chose in the app. Translated text is labelled Translated automatically, and one click on Original shows the text exactly as the author wrote it. The original is never changed.
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." Translation works in both directions. The foreman writes the daily report in their own language and the site manager reads it in theirs. If the manager sends it back for correction, the foreman reads the manager's comment in their own language.
Supported languages
Content is translated 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.
Translation is switched on per company, so each company decides for itself whether to use it.
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.