Strategy for a multilingual municipal government website
The problem
The City of Austin contracts with over a dozen different translation companies, and many departments source translations from bilingual staff. There is no coordination across these efforts or guidance on translation practices.
A concrete example of the problem this creates emerged when the city website referred to Municipal Court by three different names in Spanish:
La Corte Municipal
El Tribunal Municipal
El Juzgado Municipal
A translation guide that any department could offer their translators as guidance, with some built teachings on plain language.
A collaborative list of preferred translations that any translator could refer to and could form the foundation of a translation memory database for a future API integration.
The project
We knew that multiple translators from different backgrounds were going to work on the content, especially over time, so we set out to create artifacts that would assist all the ongoing and future efforts in creating consistent, quality translations.
An example of the research we did where we asked court interpreters, bilingual staff, bilingual judges and press contacts to weigh in on localized translations for common court terms.
My role
Create a strategy and workflows for translating content on our new city site, alpha.austin.gov.
Research, create and maintain a translation memory for the city.
Advocate for the use of localized translations that attended to plain language standards.
Research, write and distribute a translation guide.
Research translation API integrations for our CMS so that the translation strategy could evolve as the project grew.