Job Instruction - Language problems and training

I've heard people who are practicing lean, "those visuals should be so intuitive that anyone can come off the street and do the job just by looking at it."

That is definitely an ideal state (I guess?) but hardly practical. What about the person that walks in off the street and can't speak English?

In 2007, there were over 1,000,000 legally approved immigrants for citizenship. 40% of them were not living in the United States prior to this status. It is estimated that about 10% of the immigrant population speaks no English. This makes simple tasks like training very difficult.

I found a file in the TWI archives that had German alongside the English instruction Job Breakdown Sheet. It was labeled as coming from Rochester, NY. I asked my wife's grandmother if there was a canning factory with German speaking workers during the war. She drove us past the building, which has been turned into condos, and pointed out: "that is where the POWs worked in the cannery."

So, not only did we train people who spoke zero English, we trained the enemy?