Your SOPs in your team's languages: translate an opening SOP and save it to Mays with ChatGPT or Claude

An opening SOP only works if the person opening can read it. In many cafés and kitchens, that person reads Spanish, Portuguese or Vietnamese more easily than English, and the SOP is a laminated English page, or a translation someone made two years ago and never updated.

With Mays connected to ChatGPT or Claude, translating an SOP and putting it where your team reads it is one conversation, with a review step before anyone sees it.

This post is part of our series Run your restaurant with your AI. For running the business itself in another language, see talk to Mays in your own language.

The situation

Harbor Lane Café's opening SOP is in English: lights and music, espresso machine on and dialed in, pastry case stocked, register float counted, sanitizer buckets set, the door unlocked at 6:30. Half of the morning crew at Midtown would rather read it in Spanish.

Before: copy the SOP into a translator, copy the result into a document, fix the formatting, then upload or retype it into wherever the team keeps procedures. When the English version changes, do it all again.

Now: paste the SOP (or attach the document) and ask:

Translate this opening SOP into Spanish for our morning crew. Keep the steps numbered and the times as they are. Then save it to Mays in the Training folder as "Apertura: procedimiento de la mañana", and share it with Midtown.

What the AI does in Mays

It translates the text. The translation is the AI app's work, not Mays's. Steps, times and quantities stay as you wrote them.
It finds the folder. It lists the knowledge-base folders you can add to (list_kb_folders) and picks Training. If there isn't one, it can create it (create_kb_folder) after its own preview.
It asks Mays to create the article (create_kb_article): the folder, the title, the Spanish text as the body, an optional one-line summary, and Midtown as a location to share it with. Mays sends a preview first and changes nothing.
Your yes creates it, in review. The new article goes into a folder called Pending review (AI uploads), which only admins can see. Your team doesn't see it yet.
An admin publishes it. In the chat ("What's waiting for review?", then "Publish the Spanish opening SOP", using list_pending_kb_items and publish_kb_items) or in Mays. Publishing moves it to Training, shares it with Midtown, and makes the person who added it its owner.

Why the review step is a feature

Every article an AI app writes into Mays waits for an admin. For a translation, that's exactly the moment to have someone who reads both languages check it. Machine translation of a procedure can be fluent and still wrong about one word that matters: "sanitizer" versus "soap", "discard" versus "set aside". Ask a bilingual shift lead to read the pending article before you publish it.

If you're an admin yourself, you can publish right after you've read it. If you're a manager, an admin publishes it.

Keep the English one too

Don't replace the English SOP; add the Spanish one next to it. The English version stays the source. When the procedure changes:

Here's the updated English opening SOP. Update the Spanish article to match.

The AI can change an article you're allowed to edit (update_kb_article). Its preview shows the before and after. One thing to know: an article that's already published changes for everyone as soon as you confirm, with no review step, the same as editing it in Mays.

What your team gets

Once published, the article is in the Mays knowledge base, where your team reads and searches it in the phone app. The Mays AI Assistant in the app's Chat tab also answers from published articles, in the language the question is asked in, even when the article is in another language. See AI answers from your knowledge base.

What Mays doesn't do here

It doesn't translate. The AI app does. Mays stores the article exactly as the AI wrote it.
It can't read your existing articles for the AI. The connection lists folders and creates or edits articles, but it doesn't hand an article's text to the AI. Paste or attach the SOP you want translated.
It doesn't publish without an admin. New articles always wait in Pending review.
It doesn't keep the two versions in sync. When the English one changes, ask for the update.

Before you start

Connect Mays to your AI app. mays.app/ai has the setup for ChatGPT and Claude; Connecting Mays to your AI app has the details.
Writing articles is a change. An admin turns on Allow AI apps to take actions under Settings → Connected AI apps → Organization, and you tick make changes when you connect. You also need to be able to manage the knowledge base in Mays, and to edit the folder you're adding to.

Have a binder of recipes and SOPs on paper? See turn the recipe binder into a knowledge base.

Try Mays free for 30 days, with no credit card, and connect it to the AI you already use.