5 Reasons Why You Need Translation in Human Resources

When building the perfect workplace, HR is bound to come up in conversation. For a good reason, too—the human resources department is vital to ensuring a company treats its workforce with the respect it deserves. While HR departments vary from business to business, there are always a few things every department needs to ensure every employee is treated fairly at work. Here are five reasons why your human resources department needs translation services:?

1. Ensure Employee Safety?

Companies with non-English-speaking and limited English proficiency (LEP) workers will benefit significantly from translations, especially those who work with heavy machinery or dangerous equipment. Maintaining employee safety in the workplace is vital to any business, and as OSHA regulations change, so will your training programs, safety manuals, and other guidelines. After all, OSHA requires all companies to provide documentation and training resources in a language all employees are fluent in! ?

Frequently updating technical materials like employee handbooks and instruction manuals is one of the best ways to keep your employees safe at work—but what about the ones who don’t speak English very well??

To ensure their safety, translating safety materials is a must. For in-person training, interpreters can help keep non-English-speaking workers involved and help them communicate questions and concerns to trainers.??

2. Improve Engagement?

One of the best ways to improve employee engagement is to make your workers feel like valued team members. Translating materials like handbooks, flyers, and signage for employees who don't speak your language can keep them in the loop and feel included.?

Incorporating translation services into company communication systems is another great way to ensure employees stay engaged with your company. By allowing them to ask questions and make comments in their native language and then translating them to the higher-up’s language, you can build stronger connections between employees and management.?

3. Reduce Turnover?

Like with employee engagement, employee retention is also linked to how welcome your workers feel in the workplace. Are your non-English-speaking or LEP employees able to ask questions or make complaints? Can they access information quickly and without additional stress? Do they feel inferior to native-English employees because they don’t speak English natively???

These factors can all create a stressful, toxic work environment and affect employee turnover. To eliminate these issues, the best solution would be to remove the language barrier and ensure all employees can voice concerns and complaints confidentially and in their own language.?

4. Provide Accessibility?

If you’re looking to diversify your workforce, accessibility is a must. Non-English-speaking and LEP employees require translations and other language services for accessibility, and disabled employees do, too! Providing closed captions for videos and transcriptions for audio content is one of the best ways to improve your deaf or hard-of-hearing employees’ workdays. Blind employees and visitors will benefit from braille translations, and including sign language interpreters at events will ensure that everyone has a chance to participate.?

5. Maintain Legal Compliance?

Our final reason to include language services in your HR budget is arguably the simplest: legal compliance. Worker regulations are constantly evolving, and every business must stay on the right side of the law. By translating employee contracts and safety manuals, you can ensure your employees know and understand every aspect of their job and avoid unnecessary accidents. Notarized and certified translations also come in handy here since immigrant employees will need accurate translations of personal documents to work legally in the United States.?

What Can I Translate??

Translating content for human resources doesn’t just include translating employee handbooks (although those are some pretty necessary items). Your HR department may also need to translate training courses, safety manuals, signage, video and audio content, performance reviews, company policy changes, interview questions and resumes, conflict resolution documents...?

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The list goes on. Now we’ve got a question for you:?

Are You Ready to Get Started??

Are you ready to start improving your employee relations with translation services? Traduality has everything you need: create translation projects in various languages and manage them personally or delegate your project to one of our experienced project managers for additional assistance. Browse hundreds of vetted professional translators, compare rates, and communicate with them all in one place, too—create a new project today to get started!?