Translations of city resources to become more culturally accessible through new partnerships
New partnerships between the city of Boston and three community-based organizations aim to improve the translations of municipal documents.
Those contracted agreements with the Immigrant Family Services Institute, the Vietnamese American Civic Association, and the Asian American Civic Association will increase community understanding and better inform the city’s populations that don’t speak English as a first language.
“Knowledge is power and being able to know and understand what’s happening at the city level is really important for community members,” said Jennifer Pamphile, chief of programs at the Immigrant Family Services Institute, which will be providing reviews for resources in Haitian Creole.
The new agreements don’t create a pathway for new translations but rather create another level of review in the existing process to improve how documents are translated specifically for a Boston audience.
Generally, resources produced by the city’s various offices and departments are translated by Rosetta Languages, a Malden-based interpretation and translation company that contracts with the city.
Under the partnerships, in subject areas for which the city identifies a particular need, those translated resources will then be shared with the community-based organizations who will engage with the residents they work with to determine how factors like language history, religion, or community identity impact the way language is used locally, and what will be best understood by residents.
The partnerships looked to bring in organizations that “really had their boots on the ground and understood how the different parts — culture, religion, identity — affected the way that those communities in Boston use their language, or understood the language that is being used,” said Jeniffer Vivar Wong, the city’s director of the Office of Language and Communications Access.
Those reviews are also intended to streamline the process later. Once the version that the community-based organizations assess for cultural accessibility is completed and returned, the organization will meet with the city to share feedback and rationales that will be incorporated into how Rosetta Languages translates materials on similar subject matters the next time, Vivar Wong said.
The additional feedback is intended to take into account local cultural differences, as well as fill gaps where a foreign language might not, at a standardized level, have specific words or translations for some of the concepts the city is producing resources about. Vivar Wong gave the example of language around LGBTQ+ communities in Haitian Creole.
“In some languages … the words that we use here in the U.S. — such as removing gender from certain words, or we have words like nonbinary or queer — they may not exist or are still in development in different countries because of religious history or whatever it may be,” Vivar Wong said.
It’s also about making decisions not just on behalf of communities, but with their input, she said.
“On paper, it may just look like it’s a correct translation, but when it gets to the community, I feel like they will be feeling that they’re being seen, heard by the government that represents them and serves them,” Vivar Wong said.
The city’s new effort was well received by leaders from the community-based organizations working with the city through these partnerships.
Pamphile called it “refreshing” and said the support from the city is a welcome display of allyship as community-based organizations work to best support the residents they work with.
“The one thing I think is universal in CBOs is that we know that this work, we cannot do it alone,” Pamphile said. “You cannot be everything to everyone. You need partners; you need allies in this work in order to be successful.”
The organizations said they anticipate a host of benefits that will come out of the more culturally relevant translations.
Perhaps chief among them is the increased understanding and engagement that they hope it will foster.
“If you are not addressing the people right, they’ll feel excluded,” said Kamran Anjum, associate director of the Vietnamese American Civic Association which is partnering with the city to provide Vietnamese translation reviews. “The civic engagement of the Vietnamese population is going to … increase.”
Anjum said he expects that residents of the city’s Vietnamese community will also see better trust in the municipal government and improved access to city services.
“They would know what actual service is being offered, and they can plan accordingly,” he said.
Making a more knowledgeable community will allow residents to better engage and communicate their needs, Pamphile said.
“A lot of the times, a lot of the things that we do in the city, a lot of the things that we do as community-based organizations, we want to know that we’re being responsive to community needs,” she said. “How can you be responsive if the community doesn’t actually know what’s going on?”
And they said improved translations will help with emergency preparations and community safety. Top of mind for representatives at the community organizations was the COVID-19 pandemic and the experience of trying to communicate information about the public health crisis to residents who didn’t speak English as a first language.
“During COVID, everybody had a lot of questions and concerns about the vaccines and how to just basically exist in public,” said Aden Makris, grants and development coordinator at the Asian American Civic Association, which is providing translation review in Simplified and Traditional Chinese. “I think having that firsthand language experience and that connection with the actual population of speakers is super crucial.”
That sort of emergency situation is when “the systems are tested to their limits,” Anjum said.
More broadly, for immigrants who speak little to no English, those language barriers can present a challenge that forces them to stay in their own shell, Makris said.
“They’re very cut off from the rest of the world because language is too much of a barrier to do anything, really. So they tend to be very secluded, very, probably uninformed about what’s going on,” Makris said. “I think that there’s a very real social dimension to this as well.”
For the Immigrant Family Services Institute, many community members the group works with regularly speak little to no English, Pamphile said. That the information being disseminated by the city directly impacts their lives, and therefore must overcome those barriers, means that, for the organization, this work strikes a chord.
“We are sensitive to that and recognizing how people come with so many skills, but with the language piece — not being able to speak English and communicate in this language — sometimes can be such a hindrance for folks, this translation activity is that much more important for us in terms of how we work with people,” Pamphile said.
Leaders from the community-based organizations also said that previous translations of city materials have used language that didn’t communicate the right message, even if the words were translated directly.
Thuan Tran, executive director at the Vietnamese American Civic Association, said she recalled a Boston Public Schools document called “Pathway to Registration.” When it was translated to Vietnamese, the title read, approximately, “Registration Street,” she said (the Banner could not independently identify a document by that name, but there is a district document titled “Road to Registration”).
“They translated ‘pathway’ to become ‘street,’ and then it has a completely different meaning because it doesn’t capture ‘how to apply,’” Tran said.
The community groups involved in the partnership said they’re celebrating the steps the city is taking but hope that it’s the first of more efforts to better communicate with community members who don’t primarily speak English.
Pamphile said that this partnership is a critical start. She called it “great first, second, third steps,” but would like to see more open forums for community members to be able to engage with the information the city will put out through these translations in their native language.
Makris said he could see the program is well-suited to serve other communities across the state with populations that predominantly don’t speak English.
“At a larger level — at the state level, and particularly in other cities that have high immigrant numbers, I’m thinking of Brockton, Quincy, Malden, things like that — this would be an interesting project,” Makris said.
The city, too, sees room to grow, Vivar Wong said.
Future steps, she said, will also include taking into account how other cultural differences around visual design — for example, things like color choice for text — might impact how different language groups will understand and interpret city resources beyond just the words that are used.
She said the city is looking to expand the list of which languages they partner with community-based organizations to review. Currently, the agreements cover four languages, but there’s a list of 12 “threshold languages” that the city wants to offer this kind of improved translation.
The city defines those threshold languages as ones where the speaker population includes at least 1,000 individuals who speak English “less than very well”, according to the United States Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
Overall, this effort, as well as the future steps it hopes to take, is an effort to move toward what Vivar Wong called “language justice.”
“We’re kind of recognizing that every language has an equal footing,” she said. “No language is above any other, and you can just build a space where anyone can come together and interact freely.”
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