Multilingual pages

Established community members — people who arrived five, ten or twenty years ago, who are working, settled and frequently doing well — are among the most motivated supporters a refugee services organization can have.

An English-only campaign reaches a fraction of them, and it also says something about whose organization this is.

Translate the parts that matter

Full translation of a catalogue is expensive and mostly unnecessary. A short, well-translated summary does nearly all the work.

• What the auction is and what it funds, in a paragraph
• How to bid, in simple steps
• The closing date and time
• A contact who speaks the language
• The three or four items most relevant to that community

That is a page, not a project. Do it for the two or three largest language communities the organization serves rather than attempting everything.

Use people, not only software

Machine translation has improved and is genuinely useful for a first pass. It also produces errors that read as careless to a native speaker — and this audience will notice, because the organization's competence is part of what they are assessing.

• Have a native speaker read anything published, without exception
• Prefer somebody from the relevant community over a general translator, because register and dialect matter
• Pay them, for the same reason as anywhere else on this page
• Watch for terms with no clean equivalent — "silent auction" itself frequently needs explaining rather than translating
• And check the script renders properly, including right-to-left languages

The silent auction concept is the specific one to watch. It is not universal, and a literal translation can be genuinely confusing — a sentence explaining the mechanism is better than a term.

Reach the channels, not just the languages

Translation without distribution changes nothing. The communities are reachable through infrastructure that is largely separate from mainstream local media.

• Community and cultural associations
• Places of worship serving specific communities
• Language-specific social platforms, groups and messaging channels
• Community radio, newspapers and online publications
• Businesses — grocers, restaurants, salons, remittance shops — which are community noticeboards
• And people, which in most communities is the actual channel

Ask them as supporters, not as beneficiaries

The framing that matters. Established community members are donors, volunteers, employers and board candidates — not former clients to be thanked.

An organization whose materials address them as supporters, whose board includes them, and whose events are ones they would want to attend gets a different response from one that treats them as an outcome.

It also helps current clients

A secondary benefit worth naming. Clients who see the organization operating in their language experience it differently, and some will want to take part — as volunteers, contributors or attendees — in ways an English-only campaign quietly prevents.

Keep the safety line in every language

Translated material carries the same constraints as English material, and a translator briefing should say so: no client identified, nothing about status or cases, no location details for client-facing programmes.

Where translated material is reviewed for protection concerns, it should be reviewed by somebody who reads that language — a protection review of a page nobody on staff can read is not a review.

General information, not legal or protection advice for your organization. Client confidentiality where immigration status, asylum claims or family abroad are involved is a safety matter with legal dimensions — your legal and protection staff decide how any of this applies, and they should read anything public before it is published.