Bill, What you have said does not actually contradict my own statement (and maybe that wasn't your intention!).
One must not confuse the requirement to draw the instructions up in one of the languages of the EU with that of then translating the instructions into the other languages for each territory in which the product is sold. Annex 1 section 1.7.4b of the Machinery Directive says: "The instructions must be drawn up in one of the Community languages by the manufacturer or his authorised representative established in the Community. On being put into service, all machinery must be accompanied by a translation of the instructions in the language or languages of the country in which the machinery is to be used and by the instructions in the original language. This translation must be done either by the manufacturer or his authorised representative established in the Community or by the person introducing the machinery into the language area in question. By way of derogation from this requirement, the maintenance instructions for use by specialised personnel employed by the manufacturer or his authorised representative established in the Community may be drawn up in only one of the Community languages understood by that personnel." What the directive is trying to achieve is a process whereby a complete and coherent set of instructions are created in a community language, and then are translated to be comprehensible to people in states with other languages. You only need one Declaration of Conformity, and this must be in the language in which the instructions were originally drafted. However, this does not mean that you only need to provide the user instructions in one language - it is very clear that every territory which has a different language will require the instructions to be translated accordingly. Quite what the EC hoped to achieve by requiring the instructions to be originally drafted in a community language is not made clear. I would guess the idea was that the structure and culture of the western European languages are sufficiently similar that so long as the instructions make good sense in one of them, they will still be useable in other languages even if they 'loose a bit' in translation. However, if one were to start from (for instance) a coherent document in Chinese, and translate to English one might end up with a document which was pretty well useless unless it's carefully re-written after translation. Regards Nick. At 09:29 -0400 1/7/99, Bill Somerfield wrote: >Please check the following : >Annex II of the Machinery Directive > A. Contents of the EC Declaration of conformity (1) > >(1) This declaration must be drawn up in the same language as the >instructions ( see Annex I, point 1.7.4) and must be either typwritten or >handwrittrn in block capitals. > > > <SNIP> --------- This message is coming from the emc-pstc discussion list. To cancel your subscription, send mail to majord...@ieee.org with the single line: "unsubscribe emc-pstc" (without the quotes). For help, send mail to ed.pr...@cubic.com, jim_bac...@monarch.com, ri...@sdd.hp.com, or roger.volgst...@compaq.com (the list administrators).
