Work between Ireland and Poland rarely stays on one side of the water. The enquiry comes in one language, the quote goes back in that language, and then the panels are cut, the frame is welded and the ceiling is hung by people who speak another one. Somewhere in the middle a person stands at a saw translating a bill of materials in their head. Both configurator modules of AxisMod treat the language of a document the way they treat a dimension: as something that comes out of the configuration, not something typed in afterwards.
The usual caveat first, so nobody reads more into it than there is: both modules are demonstrators. They compute end to end, but on a demo catalogue with indicative rates, and I have not yet run a live job through them. The mechanism is the part worth writing about.
Where a cross-border job loses its documents
The part that always gets translated is the part the client sees: the offer, the covering email, maybe the visualisation. The part that decides whether the right thing gets built usually travels in whatever language it was written in.
- The item names are the risk, not the headings. A table header is guessable. The line that says which profile, which edge detail, which end cap, which backing, with a quantity next to it, is not. That is the line somebody orders from.
- The install sequence is instructions, not reference. It is read once, on site, by whoever is on the tower that morning. A sequence in a language the crew half-reads is a sequence that gets skipped.
- A hand-translated document is a snapshot. It describes the design as it was on the day somebody sat down with it. The client then changes a finish, the original is reissued, and the translated copy stays in the folder looking exactly as official as before.
- The worst state is half-translated. A document in one clean language is honest. A document with three English lines left in the middle of a Polish schedule tells the reader that nobody checked it, and from that point they stop trusting the numbers too.
Language belongs to the reader, not to the file
Both modules generate their production pack from the current configuration, and every document in it exists in both languages. Not the interface around it: the documents themselves.
In the ceiling module that is the layout plan, the suspension grid, the bill of materials, the CNC cut list and the install sequence. In the fascia module it is the elevation with its plan, the panel and frame schedule, the letter specification, the electrical schedule, the bill of materials and the rollout summary, generated per site, with the merged totals for the whole chain on top.
What matters is how deep the translation goes. The schedules do not just get translated headings over English contents. The names of the items are in the language of the document, because those are the words somebody reads out to the supplier. The notes and the step-by-step sequence are too. Each document is a self-contained file: you preview it and download it, and because it is generated rather than written, the other language version cannot be the older one. There is no moment when one version has been updated and the other has not.
One honest limitation, because it is the obvious next question. Today the pack comes out in the language of the page the demo was opened on, so it is one language per session rather than one language per recipient. For a real rollout the useful behaviour is the one I would build: the client's summary in the client's language and the shop-floor pack in the language of the workshop, out of the same configuration, in one go. The same applies to currency and the number conventions that go with a market, which in a production module come from the client's own rules rather than from mine.
Why it was hard: the translations were complete and English still got out
The lesson that made me take this seriously came from my own site, which has been bilingual from the first day. The translations were complete. I read the finished pages anyway, and there were English sentences sitting in the middle of Polish ones: a gallery caption, a line under a profile photo, a row of labels in a diagram. None of them was a missing translation. They were sentences that never passed through the translation at all, built into ready-made pieces of the page and shipped in English unless the call that used them said otherwise. Nothing flagged them, because from the inside everything looked present and correct.
Two things came out of it, and both now apply to the documents. The first is that English is the source wording everywhere, so the worst case a reader ever sees is a readable English sentence rather than a blank, a code or a half-word. The second is that the only test that counts is reading the finished thing in both languages, the way the reader gets it. Not the list of translations, not a count of what is covered: the document itself, in Polish, end to end, and then in English. That check takes a few minutes and it finds the things nobody thought of as text.
What it is worth on a job across two countries
- The workshop reads instructions written for the workshop, in its own language, instead of interpreting a document written for a client.
- Nobody pays for the translation step, and nobody waits for it either. It was never a stage of the job in the first place.
- A change made in the meeting lands in both language versions at once, so the translated copy cannot quietly describe the previous design.
- A chain spread over two countries runs off one set of data, with each site getting its documents in whichever language the people on that site actually work in.
If your work crosses a border
The test is cheap. Take the last pack you sent to a workshop abroad and ask who translated the item names, when, and whether what they translated is still the current design. If the answer involves a person and a date, there is a translation hidden inside every job you win, and the version in the folder is the version that was true that week.
Both modules can be clicked through end to end, in English and in Polish, including the generated documents: AxisMod. Putting your own items, your own wording and your own rules behind the same mechanism is exactly what a module is for, and the shop-floor end of it, cut lists and files that go straight to the machine, is the part of my work this grew out of: production support.
