Our previous piece covered the IAC in Antalya and the rise of Chinese commercial space abroad. Readers from the sector have since asked what, concretely, we handle for companies like theirs. This piece lays out the multilingual technical files by type. Our clients include satellite and launch-vehicle firms, ground-station and payload companies, component suppliers, and the commercialisation teams of research institutes.
One: procurement contracts and technical proposals
International projects are bilingual from the bidding stage. Technical specifications, commercial offers and compliance responses have to match the tendering organisation’s system and terminology. We treat these at the most exacting end of our document translation service: before translation begins, the entire tender is read through, and scope of supply, acceptance conditions and milestones are extracted separately for checking, so we avoid the elementary problem of an excellent main text with two pages of annex overlooked.
Two: interface control documents and test reports
A satellite is a tightly coupled system: launch-vehicle, space-to-ground and payload-to-platform interfaces are all defined in interface control documents (ICDs). Pin definitions, protocols, timing sequences and mechanical dimensions that diverge between language versions cause real failures at integration. The heart of this work is version control: computer-assisted translation tools keep a memory for every revision, so after an update only the changed passages are handled, and we issue a separate change comparison. Conditions, pass/fail criteria and data in test reports are checked line by line.
Three: operating manuals and training material
Ground-station and terminal manuals are rewritten for the user’s language and setting. Training for customers overseas cannot be a sentence-by-sentence rendering of a Chinese manual: the learners’ existing knowledge, the actual configuration on site and the instructor’s pace all matter. We work with the client’s training lead to fix the syllabus before writing begins, and where useful we supply bilingual terminology cards for classroom use.
Four: qualification papers and export documents
Bidding, customs and customer reviews regularly require translated business licences, system certificates, awards and personnel qualifications. These go through certified translation with an official stamp: page-by-page correspondence with the original and a translation stamp that makes the documents directly usable in bids and reviews. Export licences and end-user statements follow established wording rather than free translation.
Five: large historical archives
When a company builds a bilingual reference library for the first time, hundreds or thousands of historical files are involved: design standards, process documents and selection reports. Purely manual work would be slow and expensive, so we grade the work through MTPE: a machine draft, revision by specialist translators, and fuller human refinement for key files, building the client’s own termbase along the way so later projects move faster.
Six: framework agreements and intellectual-property documents
Framework cooperation agreements and the IP ownership, confidentiality and liability clauses of joint-development contracts follow our legal translation standards: clause numbering, definitions and the qualifiers on rights and obligations are examined word by word, with review by legal-specialist translators. There is no room here for “close enough”.
If a project is starting, send the document list, target languages and bid or delivery dates through the contact page and we will come back with a proposal and schedule. For the background, see “IAC 2026 in Antalya: the Quiet Infrastructure of Space Cooperation”, and “Want to Translate for the Space Sector? A Skill Checklist” takes the translator’s view.