Make sure that your community engagement efforts don’t get lost in translation. Sophisticated translation management technology that overcomes deeply-routed language barriers is available in Social Pinpoint.
Powered by the Localize platform, the new technology allows community engagement practitioners to combine the efficiency of automated translation with the cultural knowledge of human translators.
Translation is a Bridge Between Cultures
Translation is more than just converting the words of one language to another. It is a bridge between cultures that allows us to understand concepts that are difficult to grasp through our own cultural lens.
We will never understand a new language as well as we understand our native tongue, so it’s essential that community engagement experts have sophisticated methods of informing and engaging people in their preferred language.
Many cities are also becoming more multi-cultural with diverse linguistic landscapes. In some cities, large portions of the population may not speak the dominant language and will find it difficult to participate in public engagement processes (let alone be aware of them) without translation.
This can only lead to biased-decision making.
Multilingual community engagement gives people the same opportunity to clearly understand the initiative on the table as the speakers of the dominant language. It puts everyone on the same page, invites diverse cultural perspectives, fosters critical thinking, and creates far more equitable outcomes.
However, generating accurate translations in a cost-effective way has so far been a challenge.
The Trade-Off Between Scale and Accuracy
Traditionally, we have engaged culturally and linguistically diverse groups through face-to-face engagement and human translators.
Automated translation tools such as Google, Amazon, and IBM are also scalable and efficient approaches for generating online engagement materials, but they don’t incorporate the unique ability of human translators to understand foreign concepts from one language and bridge them across to another with the context in mind.
Without human input, an automated word-for-word translation can render the original message meaningless, or even worse, misunderstood.
Automated Translation with a Human Touch
Social Pinpoint now includes a new multilingual add-on that combines the best of both worlds. Powered by the Localize platform, you can use high-quality, automated translations to convert your engagement website into your chosen additional languages.
Faster than you can translate voilà, your team can then manually review, edit, and curate these translations to ensure that the right meaning is communicated.
The sophisticated translation management technology remembers the phrases you have translated on your engagement site so that you only need to update them once. And, if you need an extra hand, Localize also have professional translators available for an additional fee.
Trial the New Multilingual Add-On
After seeing fantastic results, a handful of clients who participated in beta-testing have already upgraded to the solution and there is a waitlist for further clients who are eager to get started.
If you would like to learn more or start using the multilingual add-on then get in touch with our team.
