Communicating Across Language and Cultural Barriers: Equity, Access, and Multilingual Outreach

A five-person comms team can now do things in twelve languages that used to require twelve contractors. That's the opportunity. The risk is doing it badly: machine-translated documents with no cultural context, sent into communities where trust was already thin. This session is the difference. We'll build a real multilingual workflow live, with AI doing the volume and humans doing the judgment, and cover the partnership strategies that make translated outreach land as intended rather than as an afterthought.

Participants will leave with:

• A framework for assessing whether their agency's communications are equitably reaching all constituents

• Practical plain-language and culturally responsive design principles that improve clarity for all audiences

• Strategies for building community partnerships that support authentic, trusted outreach to underserved populations

• A clear-eyed understanding of when and how to use AI translation and localization tools — and when human expertise must guide the work