What we work on
- Health, safety and environment procedures
- Operating and maintenance documentation for plant and equipment
- EPC contracts and subcontracts
- Tender and pre-qualification documentation
- Permit-to-work systems and method statements
- Regulatory filings and environmental impact documentation
- Commissioning and handover documentation
- Training material and competency assessment
Why this content is unforgiving
Procedures are executed, not read. An HSE procedure or a permit-to-work document is not information; it is an instruction that someone follows while standing next to something that can kill them. A softened warning, an inverted condition, a unit converted wrongly — these are not quality defects, they are incidents waiting for the right day.
The reader is often not a native speaker of the target language either. Energy sites are multinational by default. Documentation translated into Arabic may be read by a crew whose Arabic varieties differ, or read alongside an English original by supervisors comparing the two. Text that is technically accurate but written in the wrong register or the wrong variety gets misread, or gets ignored in favour of the English — which defeats the purpose of translating it.
Contracts and technical documentation travel together. EPC contracts reference technical specifications, and both have to use the same terminology. When the legal translation and the technical translation are produced by different suppliers with different termbases, the inconsistency surfaces during a claim.
Equipment documentation outlives the project. Assets run for decades. Terminology set badly at commissioning propagates through every maintenance revision after it.
What we deliver
- Reviewers with energy sector background matched to discipline — process, mechanical, electrical, HSE — rather than generalists with a glossary.
- A dedicated pass for safety-critical language: warnings, prohibitions, conditions, sequence, units and quantities, scored at critical severity separately from anything cosmetic.
- A termbase held across the contract, the specifications and the operating documentation, so the legal and technical strands do not diverge.
- Structured error reporting against MQM, with a version trail suitable for handover documentation and audit.
- Register and variety decided explicitly, particularly in Arabic, rather than defaulting to whatever the engine produces.
Where Arabic makes the difference
The Gulf is where a large share of this documentation lands, and Arabic is the language where machine translation performs worst on the best independent evidence available — in the 2025 WMT evaluation, no machine system tested matched a professional human translator into Egyptian Arabic.
It is also the language where the variety and register decision is most consequential and most often made by accident. A procedure written in formal Modern Standard Arabic when the crew reads a regional variety is technically correct and practically useless.
On safety data sheets
If your scope includes substances placed on the market in the EU, safety data sheets carry their own language obligations and their own prescribed phrasing, where hazard and precautionary statements are set text rather than free translation. We handle this content as its own workstream rather than folding it into general technical review — hazard and precautionary statements are prescribed phrases that must be reproduced exactly, not translated.