Compliance·9 min read·By Angel Translation Corp.·Updated Jul 2026

Global Language Compliance Calendar: Regulatory Deadlines by Market

A market-by-market breakdown of language compliance requirements: EU CE, FDA, NMPA, Japan PMDA, Korea MFDS, and Middle East regulatory language requirements.

Key points
  • Why we are not publishing a dated list
  • What each entry needs
  • Tie it to your own change events
Who this is forRegulatory and market access teams tracking language obligations across a multi-market portfolio.

Why we are not publishing a dated list

Language obligations and their deadlines change, and they differ by product class, pathway and market. A dated table published here would be wrong for some readers on the day it went up and wrong for everyone eventually.

What follows is how to build and maintain your own calendar, verified against your notified body and regulatory consultants. Treat any general list — including any you find elsewhere — as a prompt to verify, not as an authority.

What each entry needs

For every market and product class: which documents must be in the local language, which languages count as acceptable, what triggers a re-translation obligation, and who verified it and when.

That last field is the one teams omit and the one that matters most. A requirement with no verification date is indistinguishable from a guess after a year.

Tie it to your own change events

Most language obligations are triggered by your actions rather than by a date: entering a market, changing labelling, revising an IFU, adding a variant. Build the calendar around those events and the review cadence follows naturally.

Then set a fixed re-verification interval — annually at minimum, and immediately on any regulatory change affecting your class.

Questions

We can tell you what the translation work involves and scope it, but the compliance determination belongs with your notified body or regulatory consultant. Any vendor who answers this too confidently is worth a second look.
Annually at minimum, plus on every market entry, labelling change and regulatory update affecting your product class.
Revisions. Initial launch translation gets attention; the update that changes one warning eighteen months later often does not, leaving markets on divergent revisions.

Related reading

CECE Certification Under MDR and IVDR: Language Compliance ChecklistFDAFDA 510(k) Submission Language Requirements: What Reviewers Actually CheckStrategyLanguage Market Entry: How to Prioritize Which Markets to Localize First

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