Hello All

I work for a company who still rely on a large amount of manual labour. Historically most of this has been Polish but is now including Romanian, Slovakian, Lithuanian. We work in a remote area and have always struggled to find the right quantity of staff and have never been in a situation where we can demand even a basic understanding of English as a baseline. This situation is worse this year than ever before. We have a very large amount of Policies, SOP's Risk Assessments etc which we have the responsibility to to present in an understandable fashion to all staff. We have talked about using a translation company but due to the quantity of documents the expense is prohibitive. Obviously the likes of google translate offers a poor alternative, especially in grasping any contextual specifics in the text and at present we are looking at a hybrid approach of the two, using a translation service on more important documents with the idea to gradually replacing auto translated documents over the coming years.

I was interested to hear if others of you out there have had similar issues and how you went about resolving them?

Hi John

Seems to me that health and safety should be just a fraction of the information that you would need your workforce to understand, so what do you do in terms of ensuring that things like contracts of employment are comprehensible to the migrant element of your workforce?

Could be that health and safety takes centre stage in this problem as you might have too much H&S documentation and particularly so when compared with other aspects of the business.

Might be that much could be replaced with simple pictograms, including the one that says "Don't do this unless specifically authorised!" then work out what you do need to convey to various people with differing mother tongues.

Then as Natasha suggests also think about getting some intermediaries to help you make sure that the information that is conveyed in various languages is fit for purpose.