Nuclear sector
Nuclear Translation Services
Techniwords provides nuclear translation services for utilities, SMR developers, and their suppliers: quality manuals, procedures, engineering reports, and test records translated with the documentary rigor the NRC expects. Every deliverable is prepared under an ISO 17100-compliant process and reviewed by a second specialist before it enters your records system.
We deliver revision-controlled files, certificates of accuracy, and translator qualification records that hold up when a 10 CFR 50 Appendix B audit reaches your documentation.
Safety-related, important to safety, safety-significant: our nuclear glossaries keep classification language exact across every procedure and report we touch.
Framatome, KHNP, and Japanese vendor documentation flows into US projects daily. We translate it into audit-ready American English, and US content back out.
Nuclear translation services for an industry that is building again
For the first time in a generation, the US nuclear industry is expanding rather than defending its ground. Vogtle Units 3 and 4 came online in Georgia in 2023 and 2024, the first new reactors built from scratch in the United States in over thirty years. The NRC has approved subsequent license renewals that let reactors run up to 80 years. Data center operators are signing power purchase agreements tied to restarting shuttered plants, and more than a dozen small modular reactor designs are moving through pre-application engagement or formal review with the NRC.
Every one of those programs runs on documents, and a surprising share of them start life in another language. Reactor coolant pumps, forgings, instrumentation and control platforms, fuel designs, and complete SMR power blocks arrive with quality records, qualification reports, and manufacturing procedures written in French, Korean, or Japanese. Meanwhile, US developers exporting their designs need English documentation converted for partner regulators and joint venture teams abroad. That is the work Techniwords does. We have spent 15 years translating technical documentation for regulated industries, and nuclear is where documentary discipline matters most.
This page explains how our nuclear translation services fit inside a quality assurance program, which document families we handle, and why vocabulary control is treated as a nuclear safety issue rather than a stylistic preference.
The documents nuclear teams send us
Nuclear documentation is unusual in that almost nothing is informational only. A weld procedure, a calibration record, or a calculation note can become a licensing basis document, which means the translation inherits the same status. The files that cross our desks most often include:
- Quality assurance manuals and program descriptions. Suppliers entering the US nuclear supply chain need their QA manual in English before any audit can start. Our quality manual translation work covers NQA-1-based programs, ISO 9001 programs being upgraded, and the crosswalk documents that map one to the other.
- Procedures and work instructions. Operating, maintenance, and radiation protection procedures, plus the administrative procedures that govern document control itself. If you need context on how we handle procedural writing conventions, learn more here.
- Validation and qualification packages. We translate validation protocols together with the test reports and acceptance records they generate, so terminology stays aligned across the whole package.
- Engineering deliverables. Calculation notes, design descriptions, and safety analyses. Our approach to translating engineering reports for license applications keeps equation references, units, and figure callouts intact.
- Codes and standards. Foreign standards cited in procurement specs, from RCC-M to KEPIC, often need working English versions. See our technical standard translation page for how we handle normative language.
We also translate supplier audit reports, corrective action documentation, nonconformance reports, and the correspondence that surrounds them, because an audit finding written in Korean is not much use to a US quality manager with a 30-day response clock running.
Working inside 10 CFR 50 Appendix B and NQA-1
Quality assurance in US nuclear work flows from 10 CFR 50 Appendix B, which sets out 18 criteria covering everything from design control to corrective action. ASME NQA-1 turns those criteria into implementable requirements, and utilities flow them down to suppliers through procurement documents. Two criteria shape translation work directly.
Criterion VI, Document Control, requires that documents be reviewed for adequacy and approved for release by authorized personnel, with changes controlled the same way. A translated procedure is a document like any other: it needs a revision number tied to the source revision, an approval trail, and a mechanism to catch the situation where the source document changes after translation. We deliver translations with revision mapping tables for exactly this reason. When your source document moves from Rev. 3 to Rev. 4, we produce a delta translation against the changed sections rather than retranslating from zero, and the record shows precisely what changed and when.
Criterion XVII, Quality Assurance Records, means the translation itself may need to be retrievable decades from now, along with evidence of who produced it and how it was verified. Every nuclear project we deliver ships with a certificate of accuracy, the qualification summary of the translator and independent reviewer, and our internal QA checklist. Several clients file these directly as records supporting commercial grade dedication of translated vendor documentation.
18 criteria, one thread: every criterion in 10 CFR 50 Appendix B ultimately depends on documents saying what they mean. A mistranslated acceptance criterion in a test procedure is not a language problem. It is a Criterion XI, Test Control, problem.
Safety-related is not a synonym: vocabulary control in nuclear work
Nuclear English is a controlled vocabulary wearing the clothes of ordinary prose. Terms that sound interchangeable to a general translator carry distinct regulatory weight, and swapping them changes the legal meaning of a document. A few examples we police on every project:
| Term | Regulatory weight | Common translation failure |
|---|---|---|
| Safety-related | Defined in 10 CFR 50.2; triggers full Appendix B treatment | Rendered loosely as relevant to safety, which drags non-classified items into scope or drops classified ones out |
| Important to safety | Broader class that includes safety-related plus other items | Collapsed into safety-related, silently narrowing the category |
| Safety-significant | Risk-informed usage in NRC oversight language | Treated as decoration and varied for style |
| Shall / should / may | Requirement, recommendation, permission | French devra and devrait, or Korean obligation endings, mapped inconsistently across a document set |
| Verify / ensure | Distinct QA actions with different evidence expectations | Used interchangeably, weakening hold points |
Before translation begins, we build a project termbase seeded with the client glossary, the applicable NRC and NQA-1 definitions, and the source vendor conventions. The termbase locks these choices, our tools flag every deviation, and the independent reviewer signs off on terminology as a separate check, not as an afterthought to fluency. This is the discipline a strong safety culture expects from every supplier, including the one supplying words.
SMR programs run on French, Korean, and Japanese source files
The new reactor wave is international by construction. Korean partners bring manufacturing capacity and reference plant experience from the APR1400 fleet; Doosan Enerbility forges major components for US SMR developers, and KHNP participates in deployment ventures. French documentation flows from EDF and Framatome fuel and instrumentation contracts. Japanese vendors supply components and operating experience through partnerships such as GE Hitachi on the BWRX-300.
The practical consequence is that US engineering teams receive weld procedure specifications, material certificates, factory acceptance test reports, and QA program documents in Korean or French, sometimes thousands of pages per procurement package. Our Korean technical translators work daily with KEPIC-based quality documentation and Korean mill certificates. For French sources, our French technical translation team handles RCC-M and RCC-E references, AFCEN conventions, and the specific way French nuclear documents cite regulatory guides. Japanese projects typically involve operating experience reports and component maintenance documentation, where our translators keep JIS references and Japanese unit conventions straight.
Direction matters too. US developers licensing designs abroad need English safety analysis content prepared for translation into the partner language, which is easier and cheaper when the English is written and formatted with that step in mind. We advise on that upstream, before the export package is frozen.
Decommissioning and waste: the paper trail at the back end
Nuclear translation demand does not only come from new build. Decommissioning projects generate their own multilingual documentation stream: international specialty contractors bring segmentation and characterization techniques documented in their home languages, and waste shipments cross borders with paperwork that regulators on both sides must read. We translate site characterization reports, waste classification documentation under the 10 CFR 61.55 Class A, B, and C framework, decommissioning cost studies, and the environmental review documents that accompany license termination.
Language needs shift at this stage of plant life. New build documentation flows mostly into English; decommissioning documentation often flows out of it, because international waste consignees, foreign regulators, and overseas insurers each want their own language version of characterization data and shipment records. A single license termination campaign can require the same survey report in English, French, and Japanese, all traceable to one controlled original.
Spent fuel work adds another layer. Dry cask storage systems and transport packages are certified through documentation that may originate with European or Asian designers, and amendments ripple through safety analysis reports that must stay consistent in every language version. Because these documents live for decades, we archive project translation memories and termbases so that a revision requested eight years later still uses the vocabulary of the original campaign.
How a nuclear project runs at Techniwords
Our process follows ISO 17100: a qualified specialist translates, a second independent linguist revises against the source, and a project manager runs final verification checks before delivery. For nuclear work we add a terminology gate at the front and a records package at the back. Translators assigned to nuclear projects have documented engineering or nuclear industry backgrounds, and we are members of both the ATA and GALA.
A recent example: a component supplier qualifying for a US SMR program sent us roughly 1,400 pages of Korean welding procedure qualification records, NDE reports, and heat treatment records, needed in English before a customer audit six weeks out. We split the work across three vetted Korean nuclear translators under a shared termbase, ran daily terminology reconciliation, and had a single senior reviewer harmonize the full set. The package was delivered in five weeks with a revision map and certificates for each document, and the audit closed without a documentation finding.
Confidentiality is handled with the seriousness nuclear vendors expect. NDAs are standard, access is limited to the named project team, and for technology subject to 10 CFR Part 810 export controls we can restrict work to US-based linguists and US-hosted infrastructure. We are based in Texas and serve nuclear clients across the United States, from Gulf Coast fabricators to plant sites in the Southeast; you can see the full list of sectors we cover on our industries page.
What nuclear translation costs, and what drives the price
Nuclear translation is priced per source word, with the rate driven by language pair, technical density, and the records burden. Korean and Japanese technical content runs higher than French. Tables, drawings embedded in PDFs, and scanned legacy records add formatting and OCR effort that we quote separately and honestly, rather than burying it in the word rate. Delta translations against a prior revision are charged only on changed content, which is where the archived translation memory pays for itself.
Two things we do not do: we do not discount by removing the independent review, because single-pass translation has no place in a nuclear records system, and we do not quote from page counts alone, because a page of Korean weld maps and a page of narrative prose are different jobs. Send us the actual files and you will get an itemized quote, usually within one business hour, that a procurement engineer can flow into a purchase order without rework.
Nuclear translation questions, answered
Can Techniwords work as a supplier under our NQA-1 program?
Yes. Most clients procure translation as a commercial service and dedicate the output through their own commercial grade dedication process, using the records we supply as acceptance evidence. We complete supplier qualification questionnaires, host client audits of our process, and provide certificates of accuracy, translator qualification summaries, and revision-controlled deliverables. Our ISO 17100-compliant workflow maps cleanly onto the document control and records expectations your auditors will check, and we can adapt deliverable formats to your records management system.
How do you keep terms like safety-related and important to safety exact?
Through a locked project termbase built before translation starts. We seed it with definitions from 10 CFR 50.2, your licensing basis documents, and your internal glossary, then enforce it with automated terminology checking on every file. The independent reviewer performs a dedicated terminology pass, separate from the fluency and accuracy review. Any proposed change to a classified term during the project goes back to your designated technical contact for approval, and the decision is recorded in the termbase so later revisions inherit it.
Do you translate Korean SMR and supply chain documentation?
Daily. Typical packages include welding procedure specifications and qualification records, NDE and pressure test reports, material certificates, KEPIC-based quality program documents, and factory acceptance test reports from Korean component manufacturers. Our Korean nuclear translators have engineering backgrounds and work under a shared termbase so multi-translator projects read as one voice. For large procurement packages we deliver on a rolling schedule, prioritized around your receipt inspection and audit dates rather than a single end date.
What if an NRC auditor questions a document you translated?
You will have everything needed to answer. Each deliverable ships with a certificate of accuracy identifying the source document and revision, the translator and reviewer qualifications, and the verification steps performed. We retain project records and translation memories, so if a question arises years later we can trace exactly what was translated, by whom, and against which source revision. When clients have asked us to support audit responses, we have provided written clarifications on terminology decisions within one business day.
How do you handle confidential or export-controlled nuclear information?
Under NDA by default, with access restricted to the named project team and files exchanged through encrypted transfer rather than email attachments. For technology within the scope of 10 CFR Part 810 or other export control regimes, we can restrict the team to US-based linguists working on US-hosted systems, and we will document that restriction for your compliance file. We do not feed client content into public machine translation engines, and retention periods follow your instructions, including certified deletion.
How long does it take to translate a quality manual or procedure set?
A 150-page quality assurance manual typically takes three to four weeks including independent review and formatting, depending on language pair and how much embedded tabular content it carries. Procedure sets scale almost linearly because they can be split across translators under a shared termbase; a 2,000-page Korean qualification package is realistic in five to six weeks. If you have an audit date, tell us. We schedule backwards from it and deliver in prioritized batches so your reviewers are never waiting on the critical documents.
Put your nuclear documentation in qualified hands
Send us a quality manual, a Korean qualification package, or a single procedure that has to be right. We will return an itemized quote with a delivery schedule built around your audit and licensing dates, and every page will arrive with the records to prove how it was translated.
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