PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Air France sentenced to translate all its manuals in..........French .
Old 13th Oct 2010, 17:31
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Capt Turbo
 
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3Point; If you have ever seen ICAO docs you will find the note about French being also official ICAO language. Ever wondered why haze is abbreviated BR (like brume in French) or why you have to call Mayday or PAN (like m´aidé = help me or panne = kaput in French).
The many students having taken their Airbus courses in Toulouse can surely testify that a solid knowledge of French would have averted some confusing moments with their local instructors speaking a charming Peter Sellers English.
In China the expats have a set of OMs in English translated from Chinese, but the Chinese version is still the legally valid one. The bail out is that the original (English) FCOMs that came with the aircraft are still on board, so one captain can read the legal stuff and the other the tech stuff .
Have done PCs with AF pilots; only French spoken and they still did a fine job out of it. Now, how can that be? In LH they revert to German when the sh## hits the fan. Is that unnatural? And in SK, with a mix of three languages in the cockpit, they use "SASperanto" on a daily basis.
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