Languages
Compliance work in the language your team actually uses
ComplyTrain runs in nine languages, and the agents draft your documentation in the language the work belongs to. Not English, for someone to translate before the audit.
Language is a compliance problem, not a preference
Documented information exists to be used. ISO 9001 expects it to be available and suitable for use at the point the work happens, which means the person following a work instruction has to be able to read it. A procedure that exists only in English, in a plant where the work is done in Polish, is a procedure that gets explained verbally and then followed from memory. The document is controlled. The practice is not.
The same gap opens at audit. An auditor works in the language of the audit. When the quality system produces English and the audit runs in Spanish, someone translates the pack by hand in the week beforehand. That translation is unversioned, unreviewed and drifts from the controlled original with every cycle, and the drift is what gets written up. It is a recurring source of findings that has nothing to do with the quality of the underlying system.
Most compliance software answers this by translating its own buttons and menus. That helps the person clicking. It does nothing for the document they produce, which is the artefact the auditor actually reads.
What runs in your language
Three things have to be localised before language stops being a compliance risk. Most tools do the first.
The interface
Menus, fields, review queues and system messages in all nine languages. People work in the language they think in, which is the difference between a system that is used and one that is worked around.
The documents the agents draft
Procedures, policies and records are drafted in the language of the person the work belongs to. There is no English original with a translation step bolted on afterwards, so there is no second version to drift.
The approval trail
Reviews, sign-offs and the record of who accepted what stay attached to the document in that language. The evidence an auditor reads is the evidence your team produced.
The nine languages
ComplyTrain runs in English, Danish, German, Spanish, Finnish, French, Polish, Swedish and Ukrainian.
Each user picks their own. The choice is per person, not per organisation, so a Danish quality manager and a Polish production lead work in the same system, on the same controlled documents, each in their own language.
One system, several countries
Groups that operate across borders usually end up with one of two arrangements, and both are expensive. Either every subsidiary runs its own quality system, and the parent has no consolidated view, or the group runs one system in English and every site maintains an unofficial translated copy for the people doing the work.
The second is the more common, and the more dangerous. The unofficial copy is the one on the shop floor. It is the one that goes out of date.
A single system that drafts in each site's language removes the reason the shadow copy exists. The controlled document and the used document are the same document. See how this works alongside document control and the ISO 9001-structured QMS, or read the standards we support.
Common questions
Do we have to pick one language for the whole organisation?
No. Language is set per user. A group with sites in several countries runs one quality system, and each person reads and works in their own language.
What happens when the auditor works in a different language from the site?
The document exists in the language it was drafted in, with its review and approval history attached. Where an audit needs a different language, the document is produced in that language through the same controlled process, rather than translated informally outside the system.
Is this machine translation of an English original?
No. The agents draft in the target language rather than translating afterwards. That matters because a translated procedure inherits the sentence structure of the source language, and compliance documentation is read closely by people who did not write it.
Where is the data stored?
In the EU. ComplyTrain runs in AWS eu-central-1 (Frankfurt), and each customer is isolated using the silo model: a schema, a Cognito user pool and a storage bucket per tenant. Language support does not change where anything is held.