Understanding a language

Recently, we’ve heard that Ukraine is getting a lot of weapons from all over the world, primarily from NATO. NATO weapons are industrial machines that have to be configured and maintained over time. They almost certainly leave some room for interpretation. They require training and experience to use efficiently and to be able to actually configure a working machine.

The instructions are in English.

If you don’t speak another language, then you probably assume, hey, sure, they speak English. But they don’t. They speak some English, but their reading comprehension probably isn’t great. It’s probably not all that great in Ukrainian. Think about the people you went to High School with: how many of them would be able to follow instructions in their mother tongue and get things right within a dozen tries? That’s why you have to practice for a long time to gain experience

I work in industry in Switzerland, a country that prides itself on being multilingual. Most people can speak two or three languages. But they can really only work well and efficiently and error-free in their mother tongue. If the instructions are not crystal clear, they will make mistakes. So, we write all of the instructions for the production floor in German, not the company language of English.

Mistakes are costly for us, but probably not nearly as costly as for Ukrainian soldiers.