Air France sentenced to translate all its manuals into..........French .
 

Following a court action from a minor Air France pilot's union, the airline has been sentenced to translate all of its manuals, approach plates ( common to both AF and KLM ), symbols decoding, tutorial, flight manuals, SOP's .......into french !!!
This decision is hailed as a huge victory by a fair number of pilots, leaving a whole lot others dead silent and probably speachless and very embarrassed.
AF has 6 months to comply after which it will be fined 5000 euro a day per manual not entirely translated.
This is lesson one on how to bring a global airline to its knees..........and ram some french into dutch throats !!
Why fly to the the moon when we already live in plain cloud cookoo land ?

For those interested and french fluent, I think you can fish this ruling somewhere on the net. I read it and can't stop sobbing eversince.
This no doubt, will help unemployed french pilots find a job abroad.

" A minor union". How many do they have?

Is it seriously illegal now to have non French manuals for KLM?

How does this sit with European move towards english for aviation?

... hopefully Chinese, Japanese and Middle-East don't do the same!

minor would mean round about 200 members among 4400 AF pilots.
Approach plates are common to both AF and KLM and of course in english.
Guess what will happen when the french have to translate the dunno how many hundred plates ? Soaring costs for one thing. This applies to every word and symbol.
Enough to drive any sane person certified crazy.

As to how this sits with the european union.......I have no clue. The french have their own way as to what is legal or not and many a time have they told Bruxelles to s.d o.f.
If any legally able Prune member has a clue, feel free to chip in.

So they'll have to carry duplicate copies in French and English?

Or is this silliness restricted to them merely making the translation, but doing nothing with it afterwards, which would be the perfect european pc insanity solution.

Change the symbols is taking it too far especially if only 200ish pilots out of 4400 have levelled the complaint. Still the Air France print shop will be happy.

..of what i heard is that all air france pilots bluntly got from their authority an icao english level 6 without testing!!
so if this is true, they are all so much better than the rest of us and dont need this french translation ;-)

... we need Uncle Sam, The Queen and Ms Angela have a very good conversation with Mr Nicolas ...

Not true. By the way, French CAA (DGAC) rarely gives ICAO ELP level 6 as most of Fench ELP examiners aren't qualified to give that level.

... jokes apart, am I the only one to see flight safety problems?

Sacrebleu!
It took years to purge the Airbus manuals of 'Franglais.' Phrases like "solicitation of the brakes..." instead of "application," and many more.

Air France/KLM must surely appeal this fatuous ruling.

Ok, I found some links:

From AFP, in French:

AFP: Air France condamne en appel traduire en franais des documents techniques

Conservative newspaper Le Figaro (in French):

Le Figaro - Flash Actu : Air France/sécurité:des pilotes en colère

It is interesting to note that the reader's comments on that last article are overwhelmingly against the verdict.

Lastly, the union in question's web page (hosted on a free server :rolleyes:)

I haven't been able to find the text of the sentence, but from the news clippings above the gist of it is that it has been brought under the so-called Allgood Act, a super chauvinist law which has been causing nothing but trouble since it was enacted back in 1994. Its repeal is long overdue (notwithstanding that it should never have been passed in the first place, but there you go).

Erm, i dont speak French, do they do a version in English? :E

LH2,

The law is called the "loi Toubon" from the name of the minister involved at the time.

The conclusions of the tribunal in the earlier court case, where the complaint of these clowns was thrown out, stated among others (translation Google, tidied by myself) :

- Airline pilots can only be issued with a license if they master the English language in international aviation;

- Air France is an international airline. The pilots it hires can be assigned on any route it operates;

- Air France pilots are required, according to the terms of their employment contract, to be capable to use the documents necessary for the exercise of their profession in English, international language in the aircraft industry.


I also noted in one of the 'comments' that somebody said that any pilot not capable of reading the documentation in English should be fired immediately for "faute grave", first for having been hired under false pretenses, and secondly for being a danger to aircraft and passengers.


One may also question the mentality and motivation of a union, that uses the professional incompetence of their members as an argument to start a court case, that exposes them to public ridicule....

CJ

lh2

I'm not surprised the reader of Le Figaro would be shocked. The name Air France alone makes their blood boil, add pilots to that and it turns nuclear !

No, Air France pilots are not down right granted level 6 by the airline. They can only be tested up to 5. 6 can only be granted by the DGAC and that's outside of the compagny.

The too good law, standing for Toubon bill, bearing the name of a dubious minister who's IQ is one of a sparow.
Nevertheless, this bill has made numerous french compagny a living nightmare.
How this bill fits the european legal scenery remains to be assessed, and it very clearly needs to be done.
This ruling was made as an appeal from a 2008 ruling. The only remaining option is to go in " Cassation " meaning the ruling would have to be broken by the last legal authority.
In my opinion, this is a clear case where the law becomes illegal, but I no legal expert.
One thing is sure, it makes Air France look like the " Flintstones " and I would hope KLM goes up into a fit.
When you think the same people who made this claim are the same who would like to see a common freight department using both dutch and french crew, this is enough to make a wooden horse burst into laughter.
The dutch will have to display their utmost sense of humour.
As to me ? I need another hankie ! Sob !

Christian

I am so much with you mate. They should get their marching papers NOW !
This whole thing is an embarrassing farce.

Haven't you listened to French ATIS, first French then English? Like it or not, they can translate all they want, they will still have to comply with ICAO and that is English is the official language of ICAO.

This is all actually quite sad and is the result of a very small group of individuals within a company who just want to stand out, damn the consequences..

As for the KLM side of AF/KLM, I don't think this will apply to us... Yes we do use the same navigation maps and plates, but that's pretty much it. Different Operation Manuals etc etc and off course different AOC's.

A lot of people see AF and KLM as one big company while in the operational part of things they are two very separate companies... (company ethos: 1 group, 2 companies, 3 businesses )..

Another issue (that I have some personal knowledge of) is, that once French translations are available, only those are used, and the personnel (not only the pilots) start to forget the international (English) terminology, or at least certainly not keep it up-to-date.

The result in terms of confusion, misunderstanding, incomprehension and outright errors can easily be imagined.

The fact that French is not really a technical language doesn't help matters....

Oh, and another point (again from experience).
Translation is rarely done by people who are also experts in the particular field.
Even highly professional translators rarely know the exact terminology used in a particular industry, or - within that industry - by a particular company.
And since translation is nearly always done as an afterthought, and on the cheap, and rarely closely re-read by the client, some remarkable bludners and erruers do sometimes slip through...

Oh, one more....
Documentation (such as the approach plates mentioned earlier) has this nasty habit of continuously being amended, and evolving over time.
Unless the same organisation that maintains the documentation also keeps the translations up-to-date at the same time, doc and translation soon get out of sync....

Having Air France translating approach plates produced elsewhere is bound to result not only in operational problems, but probably also in legal ones....

Not for nothing does the French BEA state on the first page of their English-language accident reports that the translation is provided as a service, but that the only valid document is the French original.
The same will obviously apply to any English originals translated by Air France... only the original will have legal status.

CJ

I can speak from personal experience on the "expertise" of technical translation:
A long time ago a (potential - but that is another story) girlfriend called me in a panic.
She had just landed a rush freelance translation contract for an American textile machinery company (I did mention this was a long time ago) that needed to provide French manuals for a high tech loom they had sold to a former French colony in Africa.

Although she was truly multilingual, fluent in Russion, French and English she was totally non technical and had discovered that most of the technical terms did not appear in any dictionary she had access to.

I had exactly one semester of high school French but was in the computer field. The manuals were full of the typical barerly readable prose produced by engineers forced to write something. I could understand most of it, although never having seen the machine some context was lacking.

The "translation" was done in 2 steps, I first re-wrote sections using words that -could- be found in the dictionary and she then translated that into grammatically correct but likely totally baffling French.

If accuracy was in question she would translate the French back in to Egnlish.

Still wonder what the customer thought of the French version of:

"The machine for the interpreting of long ribbons of paper featuring small holes" (aka paper tape reader)

Christiaan ... you've got the picture! 100% with you!

Translation is fraught with difficulty. I once contracted out some manuals to be translated from English into Spanish - for use in Argentina.

One of the words which needed translation was 'shell' in the sense of an empty mask to be filled in. It makes perfect sense in English and was literally translated as 'concha' which in Spanish means a shell as is 'she sells sea shells on the sea shore'. Whilst in Castillian Spanish this would have been a little odd and nonsensical, in much of Latin America 'concha' is the vulgar word for the female genitals, much the same as the 'c' word in English.

200 or so of these manuals had been printed, there was very little I could except use it to get a laugh!

That one gave me a good laugh! :}

Another known example is that of the Mitsubishi Pajero which is sold in spanish speaking countries as "Montero" as the original term is slang for "masturbator"

:rolleyes:

Back on topic, I hope Air France wins an appeal on that ...

Can the French get even more ridiculous?
After accidents from lack of understanding, dual language spoken on French ATC, where the non-french have not got a clue of what is going on, it seems AF is not getting the "international" picture...

Maybe the same union(s) will also demand that weather forecasts, sigmets, be translated for them EVERYWHERE they land...imagine landing in JFK!

How about the placards and labels in the cockpit? "Flaps", "Landing gear", "Thrust" are TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE! They must be called and labelled as "Volets, Train d'atterrissage, Manettes de poussee"...:}

I think the best solution is for the rest of the world to adapt to the french and learn french language..:E

I will not make myself popular, but whoever is behind these pushy demands have no place in aviation and live outside reality. It looks to me as just an exercise to demonstrate how much power a union has, and protect a few incompetent who can't make the effort of learning the basics of aviation english.
Once again, the french system (generally speaking) put the bar high in studies and diplomas, and then makes sure that nobody will ever be challenged by actually using what they have learned...

That reminds me of a conversation with a French DGCA official, asking if we could perform simulator checkrides in english, now that everyone in Europe has the ICAO Level 4 or above. His answer was "certainly not, the pilots have their Level 4 or 5, and there is no reason the challenge it and make their sim session harder than what it already is by speaking in a non-native language.." :eek::eek:

So it seems this will go on, and the french attitude is yet again not ready to change one bit.

By the way, I am french....but I dont say it too loud...

Enough said.

Flex

There is precedent; Korean translated all the technical documents on their airplanes into Korean for their pilots. Then they needed the same documents for the foreign pilots on staff, so did they use the original documents? No, they translated the Korean versions back into English! You can imagine the result...
It looks as if this will be a similar case.

MurphyWasRight,

Many thanks for your tale... brings back many memories.... !

Totally classic... !
And even if the word is there, the meaning provided is irrelevant for the technical jargon which happens to have adopted that particular word for something completely different.

And there you've hit another classic problem!
Documentation is either written by tech writers - who have only a very limited knowledge of what they're writing about - or by engineers who may know very well what they're writing about, but don't know how to write understandably.

In that respect, French has one more lovely problem... (this is mostly in French > English translation).
French secondary schools teach you to write "literary" French, not "practical" (or, if you like "technical") French.
One of the rules you get hammered into you is not to repeat yourself in the same sentence or even paragraph, so you desperately insert synonyms and convoluted phrasings....

So when referring to the same "thing" in the same paragraph, two or three different words are used, which on closer examination all mean exactly the same thing.
What's the difference between "tangage" et "profondeur", in an aircraft context? None.... both translate to "pitch".... but woe betide you if you had used the same word twice in a paragraph :ugh:

CJ

We paid a lot of money for a translation into French of a complete preliminary design report for a new airport in Tunisia (early 1980's...)

I'm an ex-interpreter in French, and read through the entire document failing to notice that throughout the word "apron" had been translated into "tablier".

I never really lived it down.

Someone asked earlier what they do in Belgium. I can tell you. All manuals etc were in English. Certainly, all of our pilots be they Flemish, French or German speaking had to be competent in English. Everyone else in the company had to have a working knowledge of English.

Some of my friends told me that all pilots in the Belgian Air Force had to be tri-lingual. All flying matters were conducted in English. That stopped the French speakers complaining that the Dutch speakers had an advantage and vice versa!

Incidentally, I remember being told by an Indian captain that communication on the Sub Continent would be pretty difficult without English. He reckoned that there were 94 languages in the old India but all of them had English speakers.

You're excused..... it's not entirely wrong.

From Wikipedia:
"Le tablier est la partie qui supporte les voies de circulation sur un pont . C'est la partie en caillebotis d'un passage surélevé."

It's also used more generally to designate a road-bed, and so would be valid for the 'bed' put in place before putting down the asphalt or concrete for the top coat of the apron itself.

It occasionally amazes me how "poor" languages are really in terms of words...
So many words are "re-used" for different concepts, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, and even more often in specialist jargon.

In our own language, we usually sort them out from context... but the moment you try to translate, you're in trouble....
A "chémin de fer" is not an "iron path", it's not even a "rail track", it's a "railway". (OK, overly simplified example, but you'll find the same everywhere.)

Amazingly, the Google translation program is slowly but steadily getting more and more of it right.

CJ

Well, I quite often hear Italian spoken on Italian ATC, Spanish in Spain, Greek in Greece, American in USA :), and so on. (Do not like it)

That said, I also find that translating the manuals is a waste of time and money.

Not sure about the cockpit (I'll check), but on Concorde all the stencils on the outside panels, doors, etc. were in both English and French (I'll try to find some photos).
Made sense, because most of the ground personnel would not have had any English at that time...
Not sure if it's still the same on the current Air France fleet, though....

CJ

I totally agree.....
"American in USA" ... (not to mention "English, or what passes for it in the UK").

One problem is that "native speakers" think they're automatically speaking intelligeable English....

As to using the local languages on small secondary airports, or little GA 'airfields', yes, I can't really have an issue with that.

But using it in the busy TMA of an international airport, to me, is criminal.

CJ

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 :E.
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.

machine for the interpreting
 

MurphyWasRight
:D

ChristiaanJ
I understand that it works rather differently from previous machine translation efforts. It seems they have a database of documents that have been conventionally translated and they just do dumb (in the sense that they do no linguistic analysis) matching against the big pile of documents.

Voila!

Boofhead notes:
I once used a German IC (Integrated Circuit, have to be carefull with the acronyms as well) that was second sourced by a Korean company.

The English data sheet from the Korean company was almost but not quite understandable if you were already very familiar with the part.

By comparing data sheets I divined the following likely history:

Original data sheet - German, written by tech writer not familiar with the part.

English data sheet from German company. Readable if you waited for the verbs at the end.

Korean data sheet - Likely translated from the English version due to common quirks in tables. (but I dont read Korean so not sure.)

English data sheet from Korean company : Translated quite literally from the Korean by a person for whom English was a (distant) second language.

It would actually be interesting to compare Google versions of this, I suspect Google would easily win if given the original German.

I am not surprised that the Loi Toubon is being applied to ops manuals. But I am surprised that it has taken 16 years for someone to notice that it applies to AF.

I was working in France, at a research institute in computer science, when the law was passed. Believe me, everyone I knew thought it was *obviously* stupid. There are thousands of international scientific conferences taking place in France each year (for good reason; France is a great scientific nation) and according to the Loi Toubon all of the proceedings of each one shall appear in French. Considering that practically all the papers were submitted in English (since Latin has gone out of fashion in recent years), including those from the most prominent French researchers, the question arose as to who was going to translate them and how they were to be paid.

Everyone thought about it for two seconds, laughed, and quickly forgot the issue. As one must do with an obviously impractical decret. But a quasi-state airline can apparently be bullied, even though it's 16 years after the fact.

PBL

“"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
 

vive la différence!
would think this is a rather poetic outcome.

“It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.” Voltaire

At least it is a pleasant language, and will make for interesting, if not useful, reading. Doubt Jeppesen/EAG-Navtech etc are going to be happy providing charts to them given the liability.
:O

So what's next? Ryanair manuals in Gaelic? Maybe BA should have their's in Welsh. There must be a case for Iberia to supply manuals in Catalan, and don't even contemplate how many manuals a Belgian airline would need :eek:

There must be a case for Iberia to supply manuals in Catalan..... and Gallego, Euskera, Asturiano, Valenciano, Mallorquin ...

Yes, english is one of the main languages in aviation... which allows a lot of not-so-good individuals from Australia, Canada, US, UK, to start a pilot career with a definite advantage, thus concealing much of their other weaknesses with their "command of english".
And some of those nations (Ireland, Australia, NZ) enjoy being called "great aviation nations" (because they do supply a big percentage of the pilot workforces of many companies in the world ) ... when they don"t build any aircraft, choppers, fighters, rockets or satellites.
And in the opposite France, Italy, Russia, Israel, even Romania or Switzerland, build a lot of aerospace hardware, feature many Technical Universities and Research Establishments, but their pilots have to work a little bit harder by learning another language (and for some countries, like Belgium, Switzerland, South Africa that will make a total of three)
Now would you consider all those pure-english-speaking pilots, from the previously mentioned countries, having to perform their duties in another language (german, or italian) should it be required by law ? they usually elude the question by saying that its not the situation, and therefore is not to be considered.
We all know that the answer is a big NO, simply because they COULD NOT.
Should it be required by an hypothetical change of the international situation, then maybe a different and more educated branch of their population would have to come forward to fill the cockpits.
And thanks again for ChristiaanJ, for saying that french isn't a technical language... probably the most stupid assertion of all those pages. He will be forgotten anyway - being obviously deprieved of any academic background, I can understand he missed a lot of it, and has no idea of what has been written or achieved in so many fields.
He also displayed in his post the now usual trick, when missing in technical knowledge, to call "possible legal reasons" for help...