NMS specifications in French, section by section.
Standard clauses come back in the official NMS French; your edits come back in the same terms as your drawings. From the team engineering firms are referred to for NMS work.
01
Where NMS translation goes wrong
Your specification starts from the NMS, then your team edits it. A translator who starts from a blank page retranslates text the official French edition settled years ago, and the French that comes back matches neither the NMS, nor your drawings, nor your last project.
Your specification writer spends the week before issue reconciling three versions of the same clause, and your engineers seal a French specification they cannot fully vouch for. A clause that drifts from the NMS can come back as a question during bidding. Some firms give up and have a bilingual engineer translate the edits in-house, between other work. You should not pay twice for text the NMS has already translated.
02
Standard text comes back in the official French
Our NMS translation memory pairs each sentence of the official English NMS with its official French. When a clause in your section is standard NMS text, it comes back in that French, unchanged. The translation effort, and your invoice, go to the text your team changed, and the package comes back sooner.
03
Your edits, in the NMS terms
For the text your team wrote, we work from an NMS term base of over 15,000 terms, built in-house from the NMS itself, and from your firm’s own approved terms. The key terms of the package are settled before translation starts: identified, translated by a subject-matter expert, approved by your team, then checked once more before delivery.
04
What you get back
- Every section in its NMS structure. Numbers, titles, parts and articles kept, ready to drop into the bilingual package.
- The same terms on the drawings. We translate the AutoCAD drawings that go with the specification, from the same term base.
- Experience across every NMS section, from general requirements to the mechanical and electrical divisions.
- Both directions. English to French for most packages, French to English when the specification was written in Quebec.
- An AI draft, if you prefer. Your bilingual engineer can draft the edits in NEOLO with your term base, and review them in the editor.
- Certified to ISO 17100 and ISO 18587, and trusted by six of the world’s ten largest engineering firms.
We’ve completed our review of the translated documents and are pleased to say we have no comments, everything looks good on our end.
Brittany, Defence Construction Canada
05
Send your spec package
The package goes out on issue day: standard clauses in the official NMS French, and every term matching your drawings and your last project.
We match your sections against the NMS
and quote the text your team changed, within one business day.
We match your sections against the NMSThe package comes back in its NMS structure,
with the drawings in the same terms.
The package comes back in its NMS structure,Send the sections and the drawing list for a quote, or upload a recent French specification for a free, confidential terminology check. Looking for one title in the other language? See NMS divisions and section titles, EN/FR.
FAQ
Questions
What is the NMS?
The National Master Specification is Canada's master construction specification, published in English and French by the National Research Council. Design teams copy its sections and edit them into a project specification, organized by division and section number.
The NMS already exists in French. Why does my specification need translating?
Because your project specification is not the master text. Every clause your team edits, every product it names and every section it writes exists in one language only. We reuse the official French for the standard text and translate what your team changed.
What are the four main types of specifications?
Descriptive, which details materials and workmanship; performance, which states the result required; reference standard, which points to a published standard such as CSA or ASTM; and proprietary, which names products. NMS sections often combine them, and each type has its own phrasing in French.
What is a specification in simple terms?
The written half of the construction documents. The drawings show where and how much; the specification says which materials and products, what workmanship, and how the work is tested and accepted.
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FreeFree terminology checkUpload a recent translated deliverable. We return a short report of every inconsistent term.