Seattle is an increasingly multicultural and multilingual city. More than 150 languages or dialects are spoken by students and their families in Seattle Public Schools. This incredible linguistic diversity presents a logistical challenge for the City government to communicate with all of its residents about everything from notifications on upcoming street closures, to soliciting feedback for a proposed new bus route, to informing households about changes to solid waste collection.
Historically, translation was conducted on an ad hoc basis by consultants hired by individual city departments without centralized oversight or a citywide policy. Some departments were more proactive about professionally translating documents than others, which led to inconsistency in what material ended up translated and into which languages. The decentralized approach also led to duplicate effort—the same document might get translated multiple times—and a lack of shared vocabulary for common terms, confusing the end reader. The results were both time-consuming and inefficient.
In response to a surge in demand for translation services in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs (OIRA) started working toward a more consistent system. In 2021, OIRA procured a software platform called Smartcat to manage translation services from a centralized hub. This system allows the City to work with its 50 community translators on projects requested by city departments. The OIRA team recruits translators from the community, using referrals, listservs, and other networks to connect with knowledgeable translators, contract with them, and onboard them to the Smartcat system.
The cloud-based system provides a single point of entry for city departments to upload documents for translation, thereby avoiding the risk of duplication, and maintains a glossary of commonly translated terms to ensure consistency across translation jobs. The platform also takes care of administrative tasks like processing invoices, saving roughly 1,000 hours per year.
Over the first three years, the City has invested over $1.14 million in translation services, procuring at a rate of $0.22 per word for translation and $0.13 per word for editing. Before Smartcat was introduced, it was hard for the City to track how much money and time translations took because there was no central system. Now, the system allows OIRA to track every project requested by departments, the time spent on translations, and use of translation “memories” that save money by re-using sentences that have been previously translated. The top three departments by rate of use of the City’s new robust translation procurement tool are Seattle Public Utilities, Seattle Department of Transportation, and Office of Economic Development.
Smartcat helps teams save money and time by working with many types of source files like InDesign and HTML, and by taking specially formatted content in the source file like headers and links and incorporating the same formatting in the translation. This means staff don’t have to make changes to text they can’t read.
Most importantly, the outcome of this new approach is a better quality of work. “We get fewer complaints from community members saying that a document was prepared by Google Translate,” said OIRA Language Access Program Manager and Policy Specialist Peggy Liao.
The translation team can perform layout reviews, so that materials have fewer errors that could change the meaning of the translations. In one memorable instance, one of the City’s Vietnamese translators identified a problem with the font being used for a translation that caused the Vietnamese accented letters to display incorrectly, changing the meaning of the translation from “City Council” to “Stinky Council.” Thanks to the new process, the translator caught and corrected the mistake!
The new and improved translation system also makes it easier to stand up to audits and go above and beyond federal requirements for communicating with residents about grant-funded projects. “As a recipient of federal funding, we undergo regular audits by state and federal agencies to ensure compliance with the law,” said Salma Siddick, Compliance Manager at the Seattle Department of Transportation. “If we fail to meet our obligations, we risk facing corrective actions and potentially losing federal grants. Recently, we completed our triennial audit with the Federal Transit Administration, and the auditors praised our translation work. Smartcat has been instrumental in helping us meet and exceed federal requirements.”
Most of the City’s roster of translators are WMBE vendors, oftentimes immigrant sole proprietors, who live in the Seattle metropolitan area. The adoption of a professional, consistent translation platform has in turn led to steadier work that allows these vendors to treat translation for public sector clients, especially the City of Seattle, as a viable job when other career paths are not open to them.
Hyun Park Enstad, a translator who immigrated from South Korea, picked up translation work as a second job. Only when she began contracting with the City of Seattle did she secure enough steady work to make translation her full-time job. The work with the City helped her financially support aging parents in her home country.
“When I moved to the U.S. ten years ago, I had no idea what to do for a living and I felt useless,” she said. “Since I started working as a translator, I can feed my family and have a balanced life between work and home.”
As Seattle continues to grow and welcome residents from all over the world, Seattle’s translation system is here to stay. By investing in this software change, OIRA continues to save staff time and resources, provide a way for local translators to find steady work, and ultimately make City resources and services more accessible to our diverse residents.
Check out more news from OIRA by reading their news blog or following them on X @iandraffairs.
Read more stories about promising practices in Seattle’s work to make City contracting more efficient, results-driven, equitable, and strategic:
- How Seattle Public Utilities’ On-Call Contracts Give Smaller Engineering Firms a Foot in the Door
- Concrete Results: How Procurement Office Hours Open Doors for Small Businesses
- Seattle City Light leans into efficiencies, time savings in contracting
- Audit Your Way to the Top: How Seattle IT Maximized WMBE Spending
- No Drill Sergeant Required: How Public Art Boot Camp Helps Early Career Artists Get in Shape
- On Ramps: How the Seattle Department of Transportation Shook Up Business as Usual in Public Engagement Contracts
- Dashing to Results: New FAS Dashboard Improves Procurement Efficiency
- Panels as Pathways: How ARTS Turns Grant Review into an Art Form
- Open Door Policy: How networking events and “warm handoffs” help Seattle recruit and retain WMBE vendors
Seattle participated in the Bloomberg Philanthropies I-teams Procurement Cohort, a $1 million, two-year grant by Bloomberg Philanthropies to help transform our approach to buying. The Procurement Transformation project is a partnership between the Seattle Department of Finance and Administrative Services (FAS) and the Mayor’s Innovation and Performance Team, with technical assistance from the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab (GPL) and coaching calls from the Bloomberg Public Center for Innovation at Johns Hopkins University (BCPI). The project aims to transform City procurement to be more efficient, results-driven, equitable, and strategic. As part of this, the City is highlighting a multi-part series of stories that demonstrate citywide promising practices that can better support our WMBEs.