Translations for non-English speaking communities

[MyfanwyNixon]

I am supporting Afghan nationals who arrived in the UK through the ACRS and ARAP schemes. Many of the women speak very little or no English. I was wondering whether there is a way to translate this website or whether you have considered translating this website into languages frequently spoken in communities across the UK, for example Urdu, Pashto, Arabic or Somali.

The families I am working with are facing challenges around housing in particular and they may want to contact their MP to support them to access housing.

I have replied to point them to FixMyBlock (although this doesn't deal with actual access to housing) and mentioned the translation plug-in that @zarino implemented. I've also explained that we're not developing WTT at the moment. That said, perhaps we could consider a similar plug-in when we do get some development time.

[zarino]

I assume the correspondent already knows they can paste the URL of any webpage into Google Translate and it’ll translate the whole site on the fly. I wonder whether the women they support ever use it?

(Similarly, if the women are using Google Chrome, and have the browser’s language settings set correctly, it should offer to translate any English webpage for them. Again, using Google Translate under the hood.)

It feels like a more sustainable approach than expecting every website to integrate their own Google Translate button, is just to teach people how to use Google Translate themselves.

(Obviously, actual human translations—like we do for interface text in Alaveteli and FixMyStreet—would always be preferable to Google Translate. But that’s a massive undertaking, and often only results in translations for a handful of the site’s most popular languages. So teaching general Google Translate skills feels like a good fallback!)

[dracos]

Yes, we're not going to be able to translate the site. Possible add a Q&A to Google Translate in the Help or similar?