Speaker 1: Hello, everybody. Thank you very much for joining me today for the webinar planning a translation project strategies to be culturally inclusive. Before we start, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we stand on and the elders past and present. My name is Sonia Sanchez Moreno. I'm an artist certified translator with a master's degree in translation and new technologies. I'm the founder and director of Syllabar Translations, a small translation company based in Melbourne. Since I arrived in Australia six years ago, I've been working with organizations to help them communicate more effectively with diverse communities. For those of you who don't speak Spanish, you're probably very confused right now. I just wanted to give you a really brief snippet of what it can be like to not understand what someone is saying to you. Especially if instead of watching this webinar comfortably at home, you will be sitting at a GP clinic recently after you landed in a new country with a sick baby in your arms. Translating in the context of Australia's multiculturalism is not just about words and language. It's about systems, culture, pre-existing knowledge, learning methods, literacy levels. There's a lot that needs to happen for translations to be effective. Working in the translation industry for a number of years, I've realized that translation companies often take a very transactional approach. Where it's all about receiving a document, sending it to a translator and then back to the client. Without really taking the time to understand the intricacies of the overall project. Is the content culturally appropriate? Is the language easy to understand? At Silver, we developed a process that I like to say it's bulletproof. And you'll see why once I take you through it. And we're so committed to quality translations that we offer 100% quality guarantee or we work for free. So today I want to run you through some examples of projects that we have done that will illustrate the key elements that lead to high quality translations. Some housekeeping before we get straight into topic. If you have any questions, email them directly to me or book a follow up phone call from the link right below the video. The webinar will be available for replay. And right at the end, we will send you an email with a link. For those of you who might be interested in having the webinar slides, please email me and I'll send them to you as well. Also, please know that I'm taking bookings for live interactive workshops for whole teams. So do get in touch if this is something that you'd like to pursue. Now, let's get started with some basics and get them out of the way nice and quick so we can move on to the best part of the webinar. OK, so the first thing that you need to consider when approaching diverse communities is to really get to understand your audience. Define it. Identify the community groups that you currently work with. Consider statistics about ethnicity and English proficiency in the area where you operate. I also recommend that you not only think about the top languages spoken in a particular catchment area, but also consider underserved communities. Those communities that no one is addressing because the numbers are not quite high enough. They're always missing out on information. Now, when I talk about understanding your audience, I mean, understand the barriers. Their learning preferences, their literacy levels, their existing knowledge and cultural considerations. How do you do all that? Asking them, run focus groups or even do one on one community consultations. I'd be happy to provide more information of this if someone's interested. Just send me an email right after the session. Target your message. Once you've taken the time to understand your audience, you have a very good idea of what they need to know to do what you need them to do. That must be the foundation of your resource. Is it enough to tell someone that they need to talk to their GP? Perhaps you're addressing a newly arrived community group, which actually need to be taken through the process of how to book an appointment with your GP. What is obvious for you might be a gap in the knowledge of your community. Something as basic as this can affect how relevant is a resource for a community. Then there's literacy. Can your audience read in their own language? Do they have a preference for coffee and cake events where you bring a presenter to introduce your information rather than putting together a fact sheet? Something that's really important in the translation process is cultural adaptation. Cultural barriers need to be identified and addressed for a resource to be affected for diverse communities. Later on, I'll show you a case study on how you can easily culturally adapt your content. OK, create accessible content. Not only I'm talking about plain language here, but also how you will distribute your resource and how the community will access it. The best way, in my experience, is to build partnerships with ethno-specific community groups and leaders. Get them involved from the very beginning and also work directly with your audience. For me, at the end of the day, it's all about approaching resource development from a position of respect. Only when you respect your audience and their culture by making an effort to understand their challenges and preferences, you will be able to build that trust. Don't underestimate the power of trust, because only when you have built that credibility with trust, you'll be able to get that engagement that we were talking about, which is when your audience will do what you want them to do. So this takes me to the million dollar question. Can I just Google Translate? See, so many times I've heard organisations say that they don't have budget for translation, so they will install a plugin on their website to get Google Translate to automatically translate everything into a huge amount of languages. Two things can happen when you use Google Translate. First, in the best case scenario, people will get the gist and we save money. This is the best case scenario. But what happens if people don't get the gist? They will be confused. They might be offended. And the worst for me is that you actually won't know. You literally lose control of your message. And that can be so dangerous. But let's explore the implications of using Google Translate as opposed to producing high-quality translations in the context of Australian diverse communities. If you produce high-quality, culturally appropriate translations, the effect that you're going to create in your audience is I trust you. I will listen. I am important. They're talking to me. They care about me. What happens when the translations are just not right? I don't trust you. They don't understand me, my language or my culture. I'm not important. I don't belong here. So now that we got the basics out of the way, let's get a bit deeper into the topic and start talking about how you can maximize the effectiveness of community translations. First, I want to talk about how you're going to structure your content. A good structure will support the objective of your resource as well as the core messages that you need to convey. What's the reason why you're developing your resource? And what is the main idea that you want people to take home? The structure of your resource needs to go around these two. Your audience needs to be able to clearly see the main ideas and the call to action within the first few seconds of looking at your resource. I'm going to show you now an example of a resource so you can see what I mean. Okay, so we've got a fact sheet here and I'm going to take you through the structure of it. This is actually a six-page fact sheet, but I'm only showing you the first half of the first page. We've got a very clear title, Understanding Taste and Smell Changes During Cancer Treatment. The audience, information for people with cancer. See what this is doing? The resource is actually like waving at the audience, hey, this is for you, come and pick me up, yeah? The type of information, tips to feel better, that's what you're going to find in this resource. The topic, read this to understand how your cancer treatment can change the way you eat. You will also learn what you can do if you see changes and who you can talk to. And look at this blue box right down at the bottom. Most people who have cancer treatments notice changes in the flavor of food. Some treatments can change the taste or the smell of food or how the food feels in your mouth. These changes can affect how you enjoy food. And because of this, you might start eating food that is bad for you. So let's talk about the objective of this resource. The organization realized that cancer patients often start making unhealthy choices because of the changes in taste that they experience during cancer treatment. So they created this resource to tell people that even if they don't like it, they should still eat healthy. As you can see, you can get all this information just on the first half of a six-page fact sheet. So if the person has time and is interested, they can read the rest of the document. But if they don't, it's fine, because they already got the main information. So as you can see, a really clear structure contributes to the information being accessible. But talking about accessibility, how do we approach the cultural differences that might affect the outcome of a community engagement project? I'd like to introduce you to the concept of cultural adaptation and what that might look like in the resource development process. Cultural adaptation is the process of modifying the content and the design of a resource to cause the same effect on every single community. There are two components of a resource that we need to adapt, the content and the design. Adapting the content is basically modifying the message to meet your audience needs. In terms of design, it's using inclusive and culturally appropriate images. And we like to talk about the 80-20 rule. So this basically means that 80% of your content will be the same across all the languages. But there's this small 20% that we want to adapt to each cultural group to be inclusive and as effective as it can be. First, let's take a look now at how we can adapt the images of a resource to each community group. We have two images here. These are Facebook ads for the Filipino community on the left and the Thai community on the right. Even though they're both Asian communities, as you can see, the image actually has been adapted to each country. Have you also noticed that the Filipino ad is written in English and not in Tagalog? This is a good example of how translations might not always be necessary when reaching culturally and linguistically diverse communities. But let's take a closer look at the role of images in health promotion. These two images here are not just there for the documents to look prettier. They help your audience relate to your resource. If we see someone like us featured in a resource, we automatically perceive the resource as something that is relevant to us. But let's look at these other two examples. The one on the left has images representing some of the concepts explained. So I don't really need to know Chinese or to be able to read Chinese very well to understand that I shouldn't have fried food or sugary drinks and that I should exercise as opposed to being on the couch. Now looking at the document on the right, not only it's not very attractive to read, we just can't tell who it's been written for or get any sort of clues just by glancing at it. Can you see how it is at a disadvantage compared to the other resources? So now that we've talked a little bit about how to culturally adapt the design of your resource, let's talk about how we can culturally adapt the content using the 80-20 rule. To do that, I like to introduce a case study. So this organisation wanted to produce a resource with the main key message being cancer can be prevented and here are three things that you can do. The purpose was to encourage people to make lifestyle changes and prevent cancer. We were going to focus on the Arabic, Chinese, Greek and Hindi languages and the translated fact sheets were going to be distributed at GP clinics and community events. Now to effectively convince people that cancer can be prevented, we realised quite early on that it was really important to understand the kinds of misconceptions that people have in these communities. Because we won't be able to convince someone to eat healthy to prevent cancer if they think that cancer is caused by being a bad person. Does that make sense? So how do we do this? We had an idea of what these misconceptions might be. So we went ahead and asked community representatives directly and also made sure that we had a couple of open-ended questions so they could tell us if there were any other misconceptions that we had missed. So this is how we found and how we reflected that in the actual resource. Actually, these are some of the questions that we asked them, right? Does your community believe that cancer can be caused by being a bad person? Does your community believe that you can catch cancer from someone else? What other kinds of misconceptions are there in your community? And this is what we found out. In the Arabic-speaking community, we realised that some communities believe that you can get cancer because of fate or God's decision. How did we adapt that? We wrote a sentence in the resource that said, cancer is not caused because of fate or God. Some Greek communities believe that cancer is not curable and therefore they don't do cancer screening. So how we adapted that in the resource? If found early, cancer can be cured. Can you see that? In some cases, it's just a matter of adding a sentence, but that sentence is going to make all the difference in your resource. In some Indian communities, we realised that they believe that they can catch cancer from someone else. So what we wrote in the resource was, can you catch cancer from someone else? No, cancer is not contagious. People can catch it from someone who has it. It is safe to be near someone who has cancer. As you can see, having that understanding was so essential to make this project work. So we have adapted the text and the imagery of our resource. What's next? Now it's actually time for the actual translations to take place. Of course, working with Nati certified translators based in Australia is absolutely compulsory for this type of projects. But something that is equally important and often forgotten is for the translators to be appropriately briefed. That's something that your translations project manager should do. Just like you would brief a copywriter or a marketing agency, you also need to extensively brief your translator if you want the best results. Once the translations are done, equally important is to have a very thorough community checking process. When I say thorough, I'm definitely not thinking about giving the document to a native speaker so they can tell you how good it is. That is not an effective way to conduct community checking. Community checking should be a collaborative process between the translator, the project manager and the community checker. For it to work, you need to ask the community checker specific questions and guide them through the things that you need them to check. For example, does the document reflect how your community perceives domestic violence? Is the language easy enough to understand? Is it respectful? Are we missing anything important? If you give them the resource to assess without any guidance whatsoever, you're going to end up with feedback similar to, oh, this doesn't make sense. Or they might change whole sentences without you or the translator actually knowing the reason behind it. So having a guided community checking process is the best way to get constructive feedback. Something very important in the community checking process is you take the opportunity to also make sure that the language is accessible. Sometimes we spend a lot of time putting together a plain English resource for translation. But then how can you be 100% sure that the translator has carried across that simplicity of the language to their own language? So always check for accessibility when you do community checking. Now, plain language. Why is it important to use plain language when creating content for Australian diverse communities? Plain language leads to clear communication, which builds trust, which generates engagement. As simple as that. Some plain language basics. Use words your readers will be able to understand. So everyday words. Use the active voice. Use short sentences and simple structures. And use positive language. These are just four really basic tips. Feel free to email me if you want more information on plain language. So to recap. Work on key content first. So ask yourself, what do I need my audience to do? Understand your audience. What does my audience need to know to do what I want them to do? Present the information in a logical way. Don't waste any time to introduce the main takeaways. Use plain language. Break down complex concepts and use everyday words and simple sentence structures. Community checking. Don't skip it. Test the content with your target audience. And the most important thing, be respectful. At the end of the day, it all comes down to respect. Thank you very much for watching. Feel free to book a phone call with me in the link down below. We'll also send you an email shortly with a link to watch the webinar again. Feel free to share it. Get in touch. I'd love to hear from you. Thank you, everybody.