Why we’re proud to stand with Translators without Borders

E-Illingworth
ServiceNow Employee

4 hours ago

 

There are roughly 4 billion people in the world who do not speak one of the top 17-20 or so languages that dominate the digital content many of us take for granted. That means nearly half the planet is trying to get through daily life — health information, government services, news, technology — in a language they don’t fully speak.

 

I spent thirty minutes recently talking with Aimee Ansari, Executive Director of CLEAR Global, the humanitarian nonprofit most people know by the name of its largest division: Translators without Borders. ServiceNow is proud to support their work, and after this conversation, I understand more clearly than ever why.

 

Ctrl + Alt + Cosmos

Last month, when reviewing some content together, my team and I had a good laugh about a translation foible. The ‘space’ bar was translated into the destination language as ‘cosmos.’ These kinds of missteps can be good for a chuckle, but they can also be life-threatening in emergencies or when a word-for-word translation misses the bigger cultural context.

Aimee told a story about a health chatbot in Kenya that was set up to answer questions in English and Swahili. When a mother asked in Swahili what to do about her child’s fever, the bot told her to ‘go see a doctor.’

 

That sounds like a reasonable translation, except that’s not how it works in Kenya. The translation assumed the cultural norms of Europe or the US, not Kenya. "Nobody goes to see a doctor [in such cases], because of traffic" Aimee said. "There’s not a pathway in that health system in the same way."

The translation was technically accurate. The information was useless.

 

She shared another example from Nigeria: a study found that 80 to 90 percent of humanitarian field workers couldn’t translate the English word "sanitation" into the local languages they worked in every day. The concept didn’t have a clean, one-to-one equivalent in local languages. So how do you render an entire concept in a meaningful and actionable way?

 

This is the gap CLEAR Global has been closing since its foundation in 1993. Their determination to make language inclusion a priority across the social impact sector came in 2010, when relief services delivered in French in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake failed to properly fulfil the needs of the country’s Creole’s speakers. Seeing clearly how using the right words in an emergency is a matter of life and death, they set out to change the humanitarian and development sectors and build a world that is language-aware. Today, its community of more than 200,000 linguists works across roughly 300 languages in about 80 countries. They translate humanitarian materials. They build language technology for indigenous and native languages not usually supported in big tech out-of-the-box. They map who speaks what where, because — as Aimee pointed out — those maps mostly don’t exist. And they design language solutions alongside the communities who will use them.

 

A trust problem, not a translation problem

Another moment in our conversation that stopped me was when Aimee was describing the Red Cross’s recent review of its Ebola response. "Not working in local languages was a big issue in creating trust in the health system," she said.

 

I recognized that sentiment immediately.

 

When users can communicate in their primary language — the one they think in, dream in, argue with their family in — they engage. We see it right now with our own localzation governance suite, Localization Worksapce, where engagement is up across the board, including with English speakers, with non-English speakers, and even with AI adoption. When a user’s primary language is supported, users ask questions. They get answers. And they trust the source. Folks know when the system wasn’t built with them in mind.

 

Aimee has been proving this in humanitarian crisis response for fifteen-plus years. Our team sees a version of it every day in a very different setting. The stakes look very different on the surface (I’m the first to admin that an Ebola outbreak in eastern DRC is not the same thing as an employee trying to submit a request at work) but the underlying truth is identical. People can only act on information they actually understand, that is culturally relevant, and in a language that respects who they are.

 

That’s why our Globalization and Accessibility Product Team have chosen to support Translators without Borders this year. Not because our world is the same as theirs, but because we recognize the same principle they’ve built their organization on: language is how understanding travels between people. It’s how information becomes actionable. It’s how trust is earned. And in a moment when AI is being built on top of English-first language models, that work matters more, not less.

 

The foundational work

Near the end of our conversation when talking about how folks at ServiceNow could help, Aimee echoed something that we are constantly surfacing in our own accessibility and globalization work:

"It’s pouring the concrete. It’s building the data. It’s making sure that houses don’t fall down in earthquakes. That really boring, foundational stuff that isn’t so heartstring — but that’s what, in the long term, saves people’s lives."

 

She’s talking about another shared circumstance: the best work relies on strong foundations. For our team, that means embedding capacity for customizing language right into the codebase. It means thinking about accessibility and localization at the point of conception and carrying it through every stage of product development. Sure, the exciting AI stories get the attention and marketing dollars. But the language data, the WCAG compliance, the EAA regulations—or for CLEAR Global, the community of translators, the maps of who speaks what where--that’s all concrete. Without it, the systems we all build and rely on run the risk of failing the folks who need it most.

 

“When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, 'I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being”

― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood 

 

If CLEAR Global’s mission resonates with you, please consider supporting their work:

 

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