Bilingual, English and French

In Canada, an inspector regularly takes a job from a client who does not speak their working language. The usual answers are to rewrite the report by hand, or to run it through an online translator and hope the building vocabulary survives.

Two languages, two separate settings

• The application language is chosen in your settings: it is the language you work in.
• The report language is set on the client's record: it is the language it will be delivered in.
• The two are independent. You inspect and write in one, the client receives their report in the other.

What gets translated

• The complete report, findings included, cached so the same translation is not paid for twice.
• The service agreement and the attestation, available in both languages.
• The appendices that accompany those documents.
• The portal your client opens, in their language.

The language freezes when a document is signed: the copy on file is exactly the one the client read and signed.

What it costs, and what it avoids

Without built-in translation, a job in the other language gets handled one of three ways, and all three are bad:

• You rewrite the report by hand. Count an evening, and a report that is no longer quite the same as the original.
• You run it through an online translator. The building vocabulary does not survive, and you sign a document you have not really reread.
• You turn the job down. Clean, and expensive.

Translation is done finding by finding, in context, not word by word. You reread it, as you do with everything else.

Two clients, two languages, one file

It comes up more often than you would think: a couple where one speaks each language, or a buyer and an agent who do not share one. The language is set on the contact record, so it follows the person rather than the file.

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