SOPs in a Different Language

Thank you all for the quick reply. Great discussion!

We have a number of folks on our Leadership Team who are fluent in Spanish and can handle the translation portion so I'm looking to manage this in-house. Would I need to consider a separate approval process? And who would validate that the translation is correct? Should I use one person for the translation and a second person to validate?

Realistically, you need a subject matter expert to review the original document, a Spanish expert to review the translation, but only one approval after the reviews have been completed. No need to over-complicate things.

The technical content is approved by normal means in the source document. Then a separate, simplified approval on the translation. If you've got the resources, yes, I'd have one translate and the other validate.

I'm the Quality/Compliance Director for a 3PL I brought into ISOland. The majority of our warehouse workers are native Spanish speakers, as is the vast majority of temps we bring in for peak times. I used to give our SOPs to bi-lingual speakers to translate, and it was a long, arduous process getting final approval on a document and could take a week or two. NOW? I use Google translate. I paragraph in English in black followed by the same paragraph in Spanish in brown. I then send it to the Warehouse Director (bi-lingual English) and our Receiving Manager (bi-lingual Spanish) for approval. Currently I'm making less than one change a page afterwards. We normally can get new documents done in a couple days now. We also can train anyone off of these documents.