Hola, Bonjour, 你好, OpenCounter!
I’ve spent years of my life uttering the various greetings of this blog post. At different points in my career, I spent a year in France, a year in China, and several months in South America. After all that time practicing French, Chinese, and Spanish, though, I still wouldn’t consider myself fluent in any language but English.
When you find yourself in a culture that speaks a language other than your mother tongue, you pretty quickly learn the words for finding a bathroom, navigating public transit, and ordering food. Going to the doctor, though? Well, that’s a different story. The jargon used in medicine isn’t used frequently enough to find its way into French 101 textbooks.
It’s hard to imagine navigating a process as complex and jargon-filled as starting a business in a non-native tongue.
The 2010 U.S. Census revealed that 4.5 million income-earning adults in America speak English “not well” or “not at all.” This represents approximately 3% of incoming-earning adults nationally. Additionally, Inc. Magazine reports that “more than a quarter of U.S. businesses” are started by immigrants, which suggests that the 3% of Americans who speak English “not well” or “not at all” may have an outsized impact on our economy when it comes to starting businesses.
One of our goals at OpenCounter is to provide tools that make government services available to the broadest possible audience. We’re building tools that are accessible to everyone.
We’ve been hard at work the last few months to make it as easy as possible for our clients to offer Business and Residential Portals in more than 30 languages. We’ve partnered with Gengo to provide high-quality, human-powered, professional translations across our entire product lineup. The best part? It only takes us a day or two to translate an entire site’s worth of content, and the cost is minimal.
Are your permitting processes accessible to citizens who don’t speak English as a primary language?
We handle all the back-end processes. Simply let us know you’d like your site translated into another language (or multiple languages), and we’ll handle the rest. All titles, descriptions, questions, and answers throughout the application are submitted as individual translation jobs to Gengo. About a day later, all the content comes back and is populated into the front-end.
It couldn’t be easier from the citizen perspective. On every page, there’s a simple language selector. When a different language is selected, the site automatically refreshes into the requested language. Here are a few examples of localization in action on Oakland’s Permitting Assistance website:
If you’re interested in making permitting processes more accessible in your jurisdiction, contact us at hello@opencounter.com. We’d love to start a conversation!
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C.J. is a Product Manager at OpenCounter. He brings the best practices of Silicon Valley software development to public sector challenges.
