Official Update — The OOW Bible now speaks 11 languages and why that matters at sea

A note for cadets, qualified officers, and anyone running a fleet or a maritime college.

When I started building The OOW Bible, English was the only option. That was a deliberate scope choice for v1 — get the syllabus right first, ship to MCA candidates first. But the maritime industry doesn’t run on English alone. The crew on a typical merchant ship may have four nationalities on the bridge, COLREGs is published in six official IMO languages for a reason, and many cadets I’ve spoken to study in their second or third language while writing exams in English.

So with the 1.2.0 release, I rebuilt The OOW Bible from the ground up to support 11 languages. The website now matches.

Here’s what’s in the release, why some of those languages get a slightly different treatment than others, and what to do if you bumped into the bug we hit on day one.

The 6 official IMO languages

The International Maritime Organization publishes COLREGs (and most other instruments) in six official languages: English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and Chinese.

For these six, The OOW Bible doesn’t just translate the actual rule text. That would be irresponsible — when an examiner or a Master quotes “Rule 15”, they’re quoting a specific authoritative text, and the wording matters. So for the six IMO languages, the COLREGs body text in the app is the verbatim official text as published by the maritime authority of a country using that language:

• 🇫🇷 French — RIPAM (Règlement International pour Prévenir les Abordages en Mer), as published by SHOM (French Naval Hydrographic Service)

• 🇪🇸 Spanish — RIPA, from Spain’s Boletín Oficial del Estado

• 🇸🇦 Arabic — official Arabic translation, sourced from Kuwait Coast Guard’s published version

• 🇨🇳 Chinese — official Mandarin text from China’s Maritime Safety Administration

• 🇷🇺 Russian — official Russian translation as published by Russian maritime authorities

If you’re studying for a Russian, Spanish, French, Arabic, or Chinese-speaking flag administration’s certificate, the text you see in the COLREGs reference is the same text you’d be expected to know.

Around that authoritative rule text, all of the lesson explanations, exam tips, flashcards, oral simulator scenarios and quick reference content have been translated using a careful pipeline.

The 5 study-aid languages

The other five languages (who are some of the worlds largest maritime crewing nations) — Hindi (हिन्दी), Filipino/Tagalog, Italian, Turkish, and Romanian — aren’t IMO-official. There is no IMO-published COLREGs in these languages, and no government has issued an authoritative version. So for these five, we’ve made a different policy decision:

• Lessons, flashcards, exam practice, oral simulator, glossaries — fully translated.

• The actual COLREGs rule text — stays in English, with the translated explanation and study aids around it.

This is a deliberate trade-off. A Filipino cadet can study every concept, every drill, every exam tip in Tagalog — but when they read Rule 15 itself, they read the English version that they’ll be examined on. The point of these five languages isn’t to replace the source material — it’s to make the path to understanding it less steep when English isn’t your first or second language.

Five of the world’s largest maritime crewing nations now have first-class study support in The OOW Bible.

The website got the same treatment

The same 11 languages now live on azimuthsystemsltd.com for the marketing pages, the ambassador programme, the fleet & colleges page, and the post-purchase dashboards. There’s a language switcher in every page header, and the site auto-detects your country to show pricing in your local currency (£/$/€). The actual price you pay is set by Apple or Google for your region — so the website now also makes that explicit.

The website now also features these articles with links to Medium and LinkedIn so go check those out.

A note on 1.2.1 — and what went wrong with 1.2.0

When 1.2.0 launched, you may have opened the app and saw the lessons rendered with text from multiple languages stacked together — Russian and Hindi and English in the same lesson. Not a great look.

The cause: the multi-language content was published to our content backend on schedule, but the older 1.1.1 version of the app (the one many users were still running before they updated) didn’t yet have the code to filter content by language — that’s a 1.2.0 feature. So the older app pulled every language down at once and tried to display all of them. A migration in 1.2.0 then carried that confused state forward into the upgraded app, so even users who did update were affected.

Within a few hours, we:

1 Hid the multi-language content at the backend so older app versions couldn’t pull it.

2 Submitted a 1.2.1 hotfix that automatically cleans up any existing confused state on first launch — no reinstall needed.

3 Republished the multi-language content once 1.2.1 was rolling out.

If you’re already on 1.2.1, you’re done — the cleanup runs automatically.

If you’re still seeing weirdness after updating, try in this order:

1 Force-quit and reopen the app. First-launch cleanup runs once; a foreground refresh sometimes nudges it.

2 Sign out and sign back in. Forces a clean content sync.

3 Update again from the App Store / Google Play. If you have auto-update off, you might still be on 1.2.0.

4 Last resort: delete the app and reinstall. Your progress is synced to your account, so you won’t lose flashcard history or exam scores. Sign back in after reinstalling.

What’s next

Multi-language support was the biggest single piece of work since launch, and it changes who the app is for. If you know cadets or OOWs studying in a language we now support — or you’re managing a multinational fleet — please pass the word along. The free tier (the COLREGs module) is fully translated too, so people can get a real sense of the experience without committing.

If you spot a translation that reads awkwardly, the in-app feedback button goes straight to me. Translation is iterative — I’d rather hear about it than not.

Fair winds,

Dave is a former British Army Captain and ex-superyacht crew, now a Deck Cadet at Fleetwood Nautical College on the MCA OOW Unlimited programme sponsored by Zodiac Maritime. He’s currently serving aboard a VLGC and is the founder of Azimuth Systems, a maritime edtech company. You can find him vibe coding between watches.

You can find more information about Azimuth Systems & The OOW Bible at:

• 🌐 azimuthsystemsltd.com
• 📱 App Store:https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/the-oow-bible/id6760291715
• *📱 Google Play:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dcmurray.oowunlimited*

If you’re a cadet, officer, or anyone in the maritime training pipeline, I’d love for you to take a look.