Language accessibility for voters

Sep 22

Introduction

Why are translations necessary?

Concise, accurate language translations help protect voting rights and increase civic engagement. On your website, they help you reach your audience, engage users and promote trust for your organization.

In 2020, an estimated 8 million eligible voters in the USA faced barriers to voting due to lack of language assistance.
In 2021, the US Census Bureau stated that only 331 jurisdictions and three states were required by the Voting Rights Act to offer language assistance to voters who were otherwise unable to participate in the electoral process due to English language barriers.
In jurisdictions not covered by Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act, “language minority” groups must find their own translation resources for elections.
While 331 jurisdictions is a 22.3% increase of the total covered national population since 2016, these jurisdictions are just 4% of political subdivisions in the US calculated for Section 203 determination.
BallotReady’s translated tools on your site could be the first step eligible citizens take to vote and get informed prior to the upcoming election.

Why use BallotReady translations?

All translations are done by native speakers (and NOT Google Translate)
Users can either select their language preference from a dropdown or the tools can be preset to a determined language
Once selected, all tool-specific language will be automatically appear in the desired language across each screen
BallotReady offers a wide variety of language translations including custom requests

Which languages do BallotReady tools currently support?

Spanish
Traditional Chinese
Simplified Chinese
Vietnamese
Korean
Haitian Creole
French
Tagalog
Russian
Arabic
Khmer
Portuguese
Indonesian
Hawaiian
Somali
And more! Contact us to discuss adding another language to your site in 2023.

Why are native speaker translations so important?

This year, BallotReady is using native speaker translations!

Free translation tools like Google Translate and AI translation may capture the correct summary of content - or not. Because of this ambiguity, they shouldn't be relied on. Loss of cultural context, impossible direct translations, and awkward phrasing are all major issues that result from machine translations. You deserve accuracy.

We carefully research and collaborate with professional translators in order to preserve the integrity and intended message of your site content, for as many users as possible.

Summary

BallotReady’s professional, native-speaker translations help you:

Avoid awkward, inadequate machine translations
Build trust for your website as a valuable resource
Increase voting tool accessibility for voters with a preferred language besides English

Interested in adding translations to your tool? Get started below:

Sarah Guminski