EN-FR Aerospace First Article Docs, Accepted Without a Single Language Comment

A Midwest machine shop enters a French-speaking supply chain

The client is a precision machining and assembly supplier in the Midwest, a mid-sized shop that had built its reputation on domestic aerospace work. When a French-speaking European prime selected the company to produce a family of structural components, the contract came with a qualification gate: an AS9102 first article inspection report, submitted in French, before any production order could ship.

The package covered 60 engineering drawings, the associated AS9102 FAIR forms, and roughly 20,000 words of supporting quality documentation, including inspection procedures, material certifications summaries, and excerpts from the supplier's quality manual. The prime's supplier quality team would review everything in French. English originals had to travel alongside, because the client's own inspectors still worked from them.

The supplier had never bought aerospace translation before. Its quality manager found us through a referral and sent the dossier on a Thursday afternoon with a blunt question: could this be done in three weeks without putting the qualification at risk?

The challenge: GD&T conventions, bilingual delivery, one voice

Three problems stacked on top of each other.

• Drawing annotations cross a standards boundary. The drawings were dimensioned to ASME Y14.5, the American GD&T standard. French reviewers read tolerancing through ISO GPS practice. The symbols overlap, but the terminology around them does not, and a reviewer who meets an unfamiliar rendering of "profile of a surface" or "datum feature" starts writing findings.
• The end client required bilingual output. Every drawing had to carry French annotations without losing the English source, and each FAIR form entry had to remain traceable to the original characteristic.
• Consistency between drawing and form. A characteristic described one way on the face of a drawing and another way on Form 3 reads like an error, even when both translations are individually defensible. Sixty drawings multiply that risk.

Add the three-week window, and there was no slack for a wrong first pass.

What we did

We assigned Claire Moreau as lead translator. Claire holds an MEng in aeronautical engineering, has translated aerospace and defense documentation between English and French for 12 years, and works with AS9100 quality documentation as a routine matter. She reads a FAIR form the way the prime's reviewer does.

Before translation started, our production team ran the drawing files through the extraction workflow we use for CAD drawing translation. Annotation text, notes blocks, and title block fields came out as structured, translatable segments tied to their location on each sheet. Claire translated them in context against a project termbase built during the first two days, then the text went back into the drawings with layers and dimensions untouched.

For the GD&T question, we deliberately kept our hands off the engineering content. Symbols, datums, and tolerance values stayed exactly as drawn. Instead, Claire prepared a correspondence table mapping each ASME Y14.5 term used on the drawings to the wording an ISO-trained French reviewer expects, with a short note wherever the two standards frame a control differently. The client attached that table to the submission so both engineering teams could read the same requirement the same way.

The 20,000 words of quality documentation followed our standard sequence: translation by Claire, then a full independent revision by a second French linguist, then automated QA checks on numbers, tags, and terminology. Every characteristic listed on the FAIR forms was cross-checked against the callout on its source drawing before anything left the building. Where that cross-check exposed an inconsistency in the English source itself, we returned it to the client as a query rather than smoothing it over silently. This is the ISO 17100-compliant process we run on every engineering drawing project, compressed but never skipped.

Deliveries went out in stages, drawings first, so the client's quality manager could assemble the dossier while the manual excerpts were still in revision.

Key numbers

Metric	Detail
Volume	60 engineering drawings, AS9102 FAIR forms, 20,000 words of quality documentation
Language pair	English to French (European supplier quality audience)
Timeline	3 weeks, staged delivery with drawings first
Team	Claire Moreau (lead translator) plus an independent French reviser
Deliverables	Bilingual drawings, French FAIR forms, translated quality docs, ASME-to-ISO GD&T correspondence table, project translation memory

The result

The prime accepted the first article dossier without a single linguistic reservation. No terminology findings, no requests for clarification on the French, no back-and-forth that would have pushed the qualification into the next review cycle. The three-week deadline held, and the quality manager had the full French package in hand ahead of the submission date.

The correspondence table turned out to have a life beyond the submission, since it answers the same standards question every time a French-speaking reviewer opens one of these drawings. The project translation memory and termbase stayed with the account too, so recurring notes and quality boilerplate are already translated and approved when the next parts family comes up for qualification. If you are facing a similar qualification gate, our English to French technical translation team can scope it quickly: send the dossier through our quote request form and you will have an itemized answer within one business hour.