Start with strategy, not translation
In mid-November, I had the opportunity to speak at the For the Public conference in Raleigh organized by Technologists for the Public Good. My lightning talk focused on integrating culture and language as core principles in digital design. Much of the talk reflected themes from my first blog post, and included new examples and other lessons learned.
One point I emphasized during the talk was the need to move away from the belief that “something is better than nothing” when it comes to multilingual digital experiences.
For many nonprofits and public and private sector organizations, the default approach when providing a digital product or service in another language is to:
Skip strategy
Skip research
Translate the entire site through Google Translate or AI without human intervention
Assume it’s “good enough”
I heard versions of this throughout my career: “At least people will get the main message,” or “We don’t have the budget for anything more than an automatic translation.”
When I asked teams if their automatically translated site was successful or if people were using or understanding it, I would hear that engagement numbers were usually low, and teams were often surprised by how little impact the automatically translated content actually had.
Just as language access is more than translation, creating a user experience in another language is more than mirroring your English website. Your Spanish, Chinese, or Haitian Creole version should not necessarily look identical to the English version. In fact, forcing them to match can mean ignoring the real needs of the communities you’re trying to serve.
What do you know about your audience?
Begin your strategy with some key questions:
Who needs this information?
Which communities? Where do they live? What are their demographics and lived realities?
What exactly do they need?
What are their top tasks? What problems are they trying to solve?
How do they look for information?
Do they turn to Google? Facebook? WhatsApp groups? Schools? Faith-based or community organizations? Do they rely on family and friends?
Where are they getting stuck?
Do you notice trends in their calls to your contact center? Are their schools, local organizations and nonprofits, librarians, or health providers answering the same questions over and over or struggling to find the right information to provide?
These questions are not extra steps. They are the foundation of effective multilingual design.
Start small and have a big impact
You don’t need to transcreate your entire website all at once. Doing so without a solid strategy and clear user needs can lead to wasted money, confusing pages, and a poor user experience. Once you’ve developed your strategy, take small steps, test, assess, and iterate.
This start small approach might look like:
Transcreating a handful of highly relevant pages that are timely or top tasks for the audience you’re trying to reach
Developing a seasonal outreach or marketing campaign tailored for specific communities
Creating targeted social media content, either posted on a dedicated channel or as bilingual posts on your English-language social media channel
Factoring in your multilingual audience’s goals, needs, and top tasks, just as you did with English, will create a user experience that actually works. Investing time and resources upfront saves money long term and ensures you’re delivering information that truly serves all of the people you’re trying to reach.
