FMECA translation, RAM and O&M manuals: a transit system's documents, type by type.
A transit system's supplier needs more than FMECA translation: design descriptions, hazard and failure analyses, RAM test plans, acceptance procedures, operation and maintenance manuals and training all have to be translated. On one platform screen door contract we translated 308,505 words across 32 orders, and 30 of the 32 orders carried the client's term base.
32
Orders
308,505
Words
30 of 32
On the client's term base
What documents does a transit system produce?
A supplier on a transit project hands the owner far more than drawings. For the platform screen doors of an automated transit line in Canada, the manufacturer sent us 32 orders over the life of the contract, which fall into seven groups. Safety and reliability analyses were the largest group, close to a third of the words; tests came next, then the operation and maintenance manuals.
Words by document group
- Safety and reliability9 · 93,838 · 30%
Row-by-row worksheets: risk register, FMECA, fault trees, RAM test plan and final report, SIL worksheet. Part and failure names exactly as in the design.
- Tests7 · 64,439 · 21%
Procedures with steps, check lists, acceptance criteria and sign-off lines: prototype, EMC, endurance, factory and site acceptance.
- Operation and maintenance5 · 54,139 · 18%
Manuals with procedures, appendices and preventive maintenance check lists, in the words the tests used.
- Design5 · 43,722 · 14%
The system functional description, the EMC management plan and a peer review report: where the part names are first set.
- Training3 · 21,258 · 7%
A training plan and slide decks, which reuse the manuals' wording.
- Manufacturing and installation2 · 12,403 · 4%
Work instructions and installation check lists for assembly and site inspection.
- Other report1 · 18,706 · 6%
One further report delivered in the same set.
The figures are billed words per order, grouped by document type. Revised documents came back as new orders, so a few types appear twice.
What is a FMECA, and what does translating one involve?
A FMECA (failure modes, effects and criticality analysis, the method IEC 60812 covers) lists the ways each part can fail, what the failure does to the system and how serious it is. It is written as a worksheet, one row per failure mode, with its appendices: the functional sub-systems and the product breakdown structure.
Translating it means translating the rows as rows. Each part keeps the name the design gave it, so a reader can follow one part from the FMECA to the fault tree, the test procedure and the manual. On this contract, the FMECA ran to three orders and 51,004 words: the report, a long appendix with the fault schedule, and a supplement sent later.
A FMECA worksheet: one row per failure mode
How are RAM test plans and reports translated?
RAM stands for reliability, availability and maintainability. The safety group on this contract held a RAM demonstration test plan, the RAM final report, a SIL worksheet (safety integrity level), the preliminary hazard analysis risk register and two fault tree analyses.
These documents argue from numbers and defined events. The translation keeps every figure, unit and identifier as issued, and every defined term, such as the top event of a fault tree, the same in each document that uses it. One of the fault tree analyses and the risk register arrived with French file names.
- S-01RAM demonstration test plan
- S-02RAM final report
- S-03SIL worksheet
- S-04Preliminary hazard analysis risk register
- S-05Two fault tree analyses
What do FAT and SAT procedures need?
Factory and site acceptance procedures are the documents someone signs on the floor. They carry numbered steps, check lists, acceptance criteria (on this contract, visual criteria for glass and hot-dip galvanizing) and sign-off lines.
The factory acceptance procedure was the largest single order of the 32, at 42,224 words. In translation, a check list keeps its numbering and its boxes, a criterion keeps its tolerance, and each step reads as an instruction a technician can follow without the English beside it.
42,224words: the factory acceptance procedure, the largest of the 32 orders.
How are operation and maintenance manuals translated?
The manuals come last and borrow from everything before them: part names from the design, procedures from the tests, warnings from the hazard analysis. On this contract, the operation manual (21,670 words, with its power cabinet and circuitry appendices) and the maintenance manual (27,532 words) were followed, years later, by a maintenance manual update with its preventive maintenance check list.
A manual translated apart from the rest of the set names parts its own way, and the maintenance staff then read one name in the manual and another on the test record. Translated in the same term base, the manual says what the procedures said.
In what order do the documents arrive?
They arrive in the order the project produces them, not all at once:
The order the project produced them
- 1Test plans and the EMC plans, at the start.
- 2Hazard and failure analyses: the risk register, the FMECA, the fault trees.
- 3The functional description and the RAM test plan.
- 4Manufacturing procedures and the factory acceptance procedure.
- 5The operation and maintenance manuals, then the site inspection, the RAM final report, the site acceptance procedures, the SIL worksheet and a FMECA supplement.
- 6Training, and a last update of the manuals.
Revisions came back as new orders: the functional description twice, two weeks apart; the EMC management plan as version 1.0 and version 3.
Orders carrying the client's term base
30 with the term base 2 placeholder orders, no words
How does one term base hold across 32 orders?
By being attached to every order. The client’s term base was on 30 of the 32; the two without it carried no words. Railway term resources sat alongside it. So a part keeps one name in the FMECA, the functional description, the test procedures, the manuals and the training slides, whichever document named it first.
That is the point of translating a document set as one set. See how technical translation works on this contract, part by part, and how we translate for transportation projects across our engineering translation services.
An environmental assessment runs the same way, one set of terms through years of reports: see environmental impact assessment in Canada, in both languages.
Common questions
What is a FMECA?
Is RAM the same as RAMS?
Do you translate fault tree diagrams and worksheets?
Can revisions be sent as new versions?
Your engineers review the translation in the terms they approved.
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