A training sheet that reads well in one market often fails in another, and the failure is rarely about the exercises. It is about the words chosen for the parts, the units printed beside them, and drawings made for a single reader. When one set of movement illustrations has to serve distributors and studio staff in six countries, localisation cannot be added at the end of the project. It has to be a production decision taken before the first drawing is approved.
This article sets out how to organise one set of after-sales training material so that it survives six languages, and how to keep it alive after the equipment it describes has been revised.
Fix the glossary before anything is translated
The first deliverable is not a translated page but a glossary, and it should exist before a translator is briefed. For each part and each action named in the guide it fixes one approved term per language, records the term that must not be used, and points to a photograph of the actual part. Words that never appear in marketing copy belong in it too: the anchor point, the adjustment collar, the webbing loop, the end cap, the locking pin. These are the words translators guess at, and the guesses are what a reader notices first.
The reason to start here is arithmetic. Three translators working without a glossary produce three names for one component, and the reader concludes that the set covers three products. A coach who sees one word on the assembly page and another on the safety page does not assume a synonym; he assumes a different part and stops trusting the document. Build the glossary as a working table rather than a PDF appendix: one row per concept, the English source term, the approved term in each language, a forbidden variant column, a part number and an image reference. Date every change. When engineering renames a component, the glossary changes first and the guides follow.
Separate the artwork from the words
The most expensive mistake in multilingual training material is text baked into an illustration. If the step captions, callout labels and safety note are part of the drawing, every language change becomes a redraw, every redraw becomes an approval cycle, and the six versions drift apart within a year because nobody re-exports all of them at once.
Keep two layers. The illustration layer carries the line drawing, numbered callouts and directional arrows, with no words inside except numerals. The word layer carries step text and captions in a separate file, keyed to the same step identifiers used in the drawing. Numbers as callouts also let a translator work without seeing the picture, which widens the pool of people who can do the job and shortens the review loop. Draw direction arrows as separate objects, so a market reading right to left can mirror the layout without mirroring the hand that the arrow points to.
Units, counting habits and left-right conventions
Units are where a correct translation still produces a wrong instruction. A load given in kilograms means nothing to a reader who thinks in pounds. Decide per market whether to convert, to show both, or to keep the metric figure with a familiar comparison. Showing both is safest for a first release, provided the converted figure is rounded to a sensible step rather than carried to two decimal places, which reads as false precision.
Counting habits cause quieter errors. Repetitions, rounds, a count per side and a count in total are four different things, and a market may use one word for two of them. Write the unit into the sentence: repetitions per side, seconds held, rounds completed. Spell the month in dates or use one unambiguous format throughout.
Left and right need their own rule. An instruction to take the handle in the left hand is correct only relative to the reader's body, and it becomes wrong when the drawing is mirrored for a right-to-left layout, or when the reader faces a partner instead of a mirror. State the reference point in the caption and keep hand arrows separate from the line art, so that they can be corrected independently of the drawing.
Local names for equipment
Equipment names travel badly. The name on the factory drawing, the name in the distributor's catalogue and the name a coach uses in the studio are often three different words, and only the third is recognised by the reader. Before translation starts, ask each distributor for the term their own staff use, and for a photograph of the part if the version they stock differs.
Generic use of a brand name is a trap in both directions. In some markets a well-known product name has become the ordinary word for the category, and avoiding it makes the text sound foreign; in others the same word is a registered mark and cannot appear in a guide that is not about that brand. The glossary needs a note per market rather than one global rule. Where a local term is uncertain, the local word followed by a photograph of the part lets the reader resolve it without leaving the page.
Accepting a translation: back-translation and coach reads
Translation is accepted against evidence, not against the translator's assurance. Two checks do most of the work.
The first is a back-translation on a sample. A second translator, who has not seen the source, renders a defined subset of steps back into English. The reviewer compares meaning rather than style and looks for drift: a safety instruction that has become a suggestion, a quantity that has lost its unit, a step order that has quietly changed. Sample the highest-risk steps, not a random selection, because a random sample mostly confirms that the easy paragraphs are easy. Set-up, tensioning, anchoring and every warning deserve a full back-translation in each language.
The second is a coach read-through in the market. Give a trainer the localised sheet, with no English version and no access to the author, and ask them to set up and perform one step from the page alone. Watch where they pause. A pause is either a missing picture or a sentence that is grammatically correct and operationally unclear, and the second kind is invisible to every check except this one. Record the pauses, fix the five worst, and repeat with a different trainer.
Wording conventions are worth settling at the same time. The W3C Internationalization Activity lists the questions to answer before a document is written rather than after it is translated: language declaration, text direction, character encoding and how locale-specific formats are marked up. Most of those decisions cost nothing at the start and are expensive to reverse once six versions exist.
Retiring old illustrations after a revision
Every page needs a version identity that a reader can quote: a document code, a revision letter and a date, in the same corner on every page and repeated in the file name. A cover note should say in one line what the revision supersedes, so that a distributor holding the previous set can tell whether the copy in their folder is current.
Keep a register that maps each product revision to the document revision that describes it. When a component changes shape, the drawing of that component must be withdrawn even if the surrounding text is still accurate, because a reader trusts the picture over the paragraph. Withdrawal means three actions: remove the file from the shared folder, replace it with a note naming the current version, and tell distributors in writing which printed copies to take out of use. Printed copies are what everyone forgets and what stays on a studio wall for years.
An archive folder, read-only and labelled by revision, keeps old drawings available for warranty conversations without leaving them where someone might print them by mistake. The test is simple: hand a new staff member the folder and ask which sheet is current. If the answer takes more than a minute, the naming is not doing its job.
Treat the training set as a maintained asset rather than a file produced for a launch. That changes what you ask for at the start: a glossary with an owner, layered artwork, a step code scheme, a version register, and a named person at each distributor who confirms local terms and signs the read-through. A set built this way can add a seventh language without a redesign. Buyers who want the guide produced with a private-label programme can raise it through the customisation page, see the range it describes on the home page, and check how documents are controlled in the company profile. Earlier notes on packaging and after-sales handling sit in the blog archive, and a distributor who wants to review a draft in their own language can send marked pages through the contact page.
Frequently asked questions
How many languages should be released at once?
Release the languages the distributor network can actually support, and treat the rest as a planned addition rather than a promise. A set released in two languages with a working glossary and a version register is easier to extend than a set released in six languages with no shared terminology, because the first can absorb a new market without redesigning the drawings.
Who should own the glossary?
One named person on the supplier side, with a named counterpart at each distributor. The owner approves additions and changes and dates them; the distributor confirms the local term and the photograph of the part. Without a single owner the glossary becomes a suggestion list and the translators go back to guessing.
Is machine translation acceptable for the first draft?
As a rough draft for internal review it can save time on plain descriptive paragraphs. It should not be used for safety notes, set-up sequences or any text that names a part, because those are exactly the passages where a fluent but wrong sentence passes unnoticed. Treat any machine output as an unreviewed draft and put it through the same back-translation check.
What happens when a product is revised but the guide is still accurate?
Reissue the document with a new revision letter and a note confirming that the text is unchanged and the drawings are current. Silence is the problem, not the change: a distributor who cannot tell whether a sheet has been checked against the new version will assume it has not, and will stop using it.