If your crew can't read the training, you don't have training

Most safety training is written once, in English, by someone who never had to read it in a second language. On a lot of frontline sites, a good share of the crew is reading it in their second, third or fourth. The training was delivered. Whether it was understood is a separate question, and it is the one that matters.

The usual fix is a translate button or a set of subtitles bolted onto the existing material. That helps, but it quietly assumes the words were the only problem. Machine translation of a dense policy produces a dense policy in another language. A worker who would not have got through the English version does not necessarily get through the translated one.

There is a difference between making the words available and making the meaning land. The first is a feature. The second is the actual job, and it is measured against the person receiving the instruction, not the tidiness of the file.

The part people underrate is how little of a safety instruction is really about language. A guard, a lockout point, a pinch point, an exclusion zone are things you can show. A hazard marked directly onto a photograph of the machine that worker actually uses carries meaning before a single word is translated. Get the picture right and translation has less work to do, and less room to go wrong.

Then you check. Not whether they attended, but whether they can tell you back the thing you needed them to know, in the language they think in. If they can, you have training. If they cannot, you have a document.

So the question to ask of any training on a mixed-language site is not whether it is available in other languages. It is whether the worker who struggles most with English would come out of it able to do the job safely. If the honest answer is no, the language toggle has not fixed it.