Safe, Efficient, Profitable: A Worker Safety Podcast
Joe and Jen Allen of Allen Safety LLC take their combined 40+ years of worker safety, OSHA, EPA, production, sanitation, and engineering experience in Manufacturing Plants including Harvest Plants/Packers, Case Readies and Further Processing Plants, Food Production Plants, Feed Mills, Grain Elevators, Bakeries, Farms, Feed Lots, and Petro-Chemical and bring you their top methods for identifying risk, preventing injuries, conquering the workload, auditing, managing emergencies and catastrophic events, and working through OSHA citations. They're breaking down real safety opportunities, safety citations, and emergency situations from real locations, and discussing realistic solutions that can actually be implement based on their personal experiences spending 40+ weeks in the field every year since 2001. Joe and Jen are using all of that experience to provide a fresh outlook on worker safety by providing honest, (no sponsors here!) and straight forward, easy to understand safety coaching with actionable guidance to move your safety program forward in a way that provides tangible results.
Safe, Efficient, Profitable: A Worker Safety Podcast
#62: Eliminating Language Barriers in Worker Safety
In this episode we welcome our good friend and employee George Mazzuca to chat about a huge potential risk in safety: miscommunication and wrong translations. George covers challenges he's personally come across in his career in the plants, along with solutions for translating safety training & documents for multiple languages. Full episode summary below
Episode Summary: "Breaking Down Language Barriers in the Workplace"
In this episode, hosts Joe and George discuss the significant challenges that language barriers pose in the workplace, particularly in industries like food production. They explore common scenarios such as new employee orientations and safety training, emphasizing how language differences can complicate communication. George explains how companies use tools like language lines and certified translators to bridge these gaps but notes that misinterpretation still occurs, especially with technical jargon. The conversation highlights the importance of finding effective methods, like using visual aids, videos, and certified interpreters, to ensure safety and consistency in communication.
The episode also touches on how different dialects and terms can add layers of complexity to training and how video tutorials can standardize procedures to avoid variations in teaching methods. Joe emphasizes the importance of keeping training accessible, efficient, and clear to minimize turnover and ensure worker safety. The hosts wrap up by offering advice on maintaining a safe and productive work environment while navigating the complexities of language barriers.
Key Words: Language barriers, workplace safety, certified translators, language line, orientation, bilingual employees, technical jargon, video training, communication challenges, lockout/tagout, food industry, safety procedures, interpreter, visual aids, employee turnover.
All right, today's episode language barriers. I mean, is there any? Hola, hola, that's what we're talking about today. Stay tuned. All right, this is George, this is Joe. So what we do is George can speak two languages languages fluently. I cannot, and I I tried, but I cannot, and so we were like let's do an episode on some of the things that happen, like orientation. You walk into any job that there is, you have some kind of orientation, right, and then what's the first barrier?
Speaker 2:well. So, essentially, if you don't speak the primary language, right so for us to be english. If you walk in, from the moment you go through orientation, every single thing that you do has to be translated. You either have to have an interpreter, all your documents have to be translated. So, right off the bat, if you don't speak English, you're already, you know, starting off with having to deal with that.
Speaker 1:Who do you think can do that? Who can translate it? Can it meet me? Can, can it meet me? Can I go to like some kind of thing and say, type this in and it's going to give me the right words, or how does it work?
Speaker 2:So a lot of facilities will use a language line and they also some actually employ a certified translator or interpreter.
Speaker 1:So tell me about language lines.
Speaker 2:Essentially, a language line is a third-party service that you can call in and you should have access. Anybody who needs that translation service at the facility would be able to have access to that number and call in, and then a person is there to translate. They're totally unbiased. They're literally just going to translate what you tell them.
Speaker 1:Now we've had, we've used it for like medical events, hospitals, plants, evacuation, user different things. And one of the things we did notice is sometimes there's still some misinterpretation of what people actually saying, or maybe the wording. Maybe somebody will use a word and they're like well, how does that really translate right?
Speaker 2:do. You have a lot of jargon, a lot of different. You know acronyms and things that are used in the facilities in your food plants and essentially it's really hard to translate some of those directly. So just because I'm translating the word directly from english to spanish or any other language doesn't necessarily mean the person is going to understand you Makes sense.
Speaker 1:All right, so now we go to. I'm going to new language, so Spanish. We're going to translate. Boy comes in orientation, you have to be certified or anything, or can anybody translate it?
Speaker 2:So essentially to do documents, you really should have a certified translator. Unfortunately, that does not happen very often. A lot of times we'll pull somebody who's bilingual. We'll have them help us translate If it's any kind of a certified document, especially if it's something that requires any kind of agency, some kind of governmental agency, that's where you're going to struggle if you don't have a certified translator.
Speaker 1:All right. So now we've got a translator, now we've got documents. What are the barriers we got? We got learning, like, maybe, refrigeration. We have refrigeration in a lot of our plants. We're going to learn refrigeration, but people know Spanish. They go learn refrigeration, they learn English and we've seen that no-transcript hpr and you're like, okay, how do you say that?
Speaker 2:and they get it all and they say hbr. So unfortunately, what happens is that that person does have some knowledge of english, so they may speak some english. They're predominantly spanish, let's say that's their, their first language. And then when they learn the systems and they learn how to be a refrigeration technician or a refrigeration operator makes it, then they'll start using hpr, because that's what everybody calls it, or compressor. So then in their language they don't really ever use that word in Spanish. So then when you ask, you know we asked to translate some of those words.
Speaker 1:They're kind of like well, we always say compressor, we always say HPR. That makes sense. So we don't. We don't want to just educate them on the subject, but we may look at the edge game how to translate it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of times you will have to have a direct translation and say, look, this is what it says in the book or this is what it is, you know the direct translation, but then also say this is what they're going to actually understand. These are the words that I can use so they can actually understand me in their everyday life.
Speaker 1:Well, for Lockout, tagout, we do write lockout procedures, but the main thing we try to do is stay out of the language barrier by doing more pictures. And we do that with pictures and arrows, because that's been an opportunity we've seen is that we've tried to write it out and say this is like our procedure One, through three, four or five steps you give it to somebody and it's so hard to figure out the translation of everyone and the different dialects and the different ways interpreted.
Speaker 1:So, we said you know what? We just do pictures in ours. So it's a picture of how you do this, a picture where you're going to check for power, and a picture of when it's good, and it seems like most people seem to be better with that Of course.
Speaker 2:And then you know, picture says a thousand words, right, the other thing too, with pictures, or a lot of the facilities using video for the recording right, that's a good idea.
Speaker 1:I've seen that when people like video, the job yep, so in orientation. I'm like this is your job and you can actually see how it moves, so I can show you step by step so we can actually do that lockout as well.
Speaker 2:Right, hey, this is step one. Show somebody doing it that kind of takes out the guesswork, like I don't know the words you're using because I'm just barely learning english, whereas if you say, watch this video, you know, look at this, that's exactly how we're going to do it.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. I like that idea All right. So now we've got some orientation, now we've got some training, now we've got some lockout, now we've got refrigeration. What's the weird one? The weird one to me is that when people are doing a job test so whatever that is like maybe we videoed or something they new job task and it seems like all the trainers that we hired to do that job had their own little version of it. So I think maybe your your idea of the video and it kind of kind of breaks down that barrier too, because I've seen that where somebody will train somebody to do a job cast, they do it one way and and even though maybe it wasn't maybe a language barrier, they'll train them on how to do it a different way, someone else. So you're trying to do the same job, three different people doing the same job. They're all doing differently. But it could be language, it could be interpretation, it could be whatever.
Speaker 2:But I like the video because it's like this is how we're going to do it here and it's the process right, and one of the big things to remember is that is as a new hire, as at least when I went into a food plant for the first time it's very overwhelming, so, especially somebody who doesn't speak the language first.
Speaker 1:First feed it. I mean it's a lot.
Speaker 2:Just first month or so when I was at the plant I was like I never been a plant this big, a lot of moving parts, anything's moving around, yeah it's crazy, and it's essentially got its own little mini city, and so people are trying to get their bearings on top of the fact that they don't speak the language, the primary language. I do think that a lot of facilities have done a really good job of having documents translated, having certain trainers, having people that can interpret for them, but either way, it's still pretty, pretty difficult. It's pretty overwhelming. So we have to keep all that in mind and try to make it as easy as possible to for them to acclimate and also to keep them safe absolutely.
Speaker 1:And then, you know, there's that word turnover yeah, and the turnover.
Speaker 1:You feel like you get everybody trained and then we just kind of start over some days. But I do agree with you that the, the locations are doing better with the languages and the documents. I still think there's a long way to go. I still think, when you look at the overall documents that a person would read like myself, when I went into the food plant I was like there's a lot of documents, there's a lot of stuff going on and you're like still struggled. You're like okay, I'm not really sure what we're doing.
Speaker 2:Even if you speak the language it's a lot right.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you feel a little bit lost. So definitely those language barriers are, you know, they present an issue. Also, a lot of times we'll go into a training. We had an interpreter and basically we gave somebody a training, let's say on hascom, yeah, something along those lines. And then they, they had an interpreter, and then we'll have them either sign where they said, hey, this person translated, but that person doesn't necessarily know exactly what happened, it was just based on whatever that interpreter said, absolutely so that's again open to interpretation, right, no pun intended, but unfortunately sometimes the message doesn't always get across that's our ideas for today.
Speaker 1:If you want to listen, we do have other episodes and the idea of these is is how the industry works, things you can do in the industry and just different ideas to keep your people safe. Thank you for watching and don't forget everything in this is our opinions. Please do a thorough risk assessment. Yeah, how do you want to do it at your own location? But we appreciate you listening and watching this week and I think we're kind of done. Gracias, good day everyone.
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