Why Translate Compliance Training—and 4 Tips to Get It Right

Providing compliance training in employees’ native languages isn’t just a nice to have; it’s essential for effective communication. Complex policies, legal jargon, and detailed regulations are hard enough for native speakers to understand. Understanding the same documents can quickly become a misinterpretation minefield for multilingual learners. 

Here’s how multilingual compliance training can make a difference—followed by four tips to improve translation accuracy and efficacy.

Why translate compliance training? 

Recent studies have found that the brain processes our native language faster and easier than secondary languages—including languages in which we’re proficient. Translating compliance training into employees’ native languages increases understanding, reduces risk, and ensures employees know the rules and expectations.

Below, explore a few specific ways multilingual training contributes to employees’ understanding of workplace safety information, business ethics, and legal or regulatory standards.

1. Improve workplace safety 

Accurate translations help employees understand workplace safety regulations and emergency procedures, reducing the risk of on-the-job accidents and ensuring everyone knows how to respond in critical situations.

2. Meet legal or regulatory requirements

Many regulatory agencies require organizations to provide accessible training. Translating materials into employees’ native languages helps meet these requirements while fostering inclusivity. 

For example, OSHA states that “employee training required by OSHA standards must be presented in a manner that employees can understand.” This includes agriculture, construction, general industry, and maritime training requirements.

3. Mitigate risk and prevent costly misunderstandings

Compliance breaches can lead to serious consequences, including legal liability, financial penalties, and damage to your company’s reputation. Translation minimizes these risks by ensuring employees clearly understand the expectations and rules. For instance, providing translated data security guidelines can significantly lower the likelihood of privacy breaches caused by misunderstandings.

4 best practices to translate compliance training materials effectively

Employees can’t apply training they don’t understand. And it’s too important to leave comprehension to chance on training topics like data security, business ethics, anti-harassment, and safety. Here are a few final tips to help you translate these materials effectively. 

Accurately identify your target languages

Start by identifying the languages employees use. Pay attention to dialects, and don’t assume that everyone speaks the same dialect based solely on geography or ethnicity. 

Incorporate local regulations and examples

Tailor compliance training to align with the specific laws, practices, and cultural norms of the regions where your employees are based. Localizing content to account for these regional or cultural differences increases the relevance of online training, making it easier for employees to relate to, and apply the content.

For example, imagine you’re designing an e-learning course for a global delivery company. The goal is to train drivers in both the U.S. and India on safe and timely package delivery. Rather than just translating the text from English to Hindi, you’ll also need to adjust the content to align with local traffic rules and safety standards.

Use plain language 

Legal speak or highly technical wording can be dense and difficult to understand—increasing the risk of translation mistakes. Use plain, everyday language in your source materials to ensure that the meaning is accurately conveyed when translating across languages. Also, avoid idioms or cultural references that may not make sense globally.

Validate translations with professionals

Multilingual compliance training requires rigorous review processes to ensure translations are both accurate and legally sound. Employ professional translators and legal experts to validate content accuracy in context. You can also use authoring tools with translation memory systems or glossaries to maintain consistency across online training courses.

Remove language barriers to compliance

Following the rules starts with understanding them. Accurate, human-validated translation of compliance training is a critical step to creating a more ethical, safe, and legally compliant workplace. 

Want to learn more about training a multilingual workforce? Check out this post to unlock the benefits of e-learning localization.