Using the same translated terms in the same manner across government agencies reduces confusion and increases trust in the government and its services.

Now in Phase 3, the Multilingual Glossary Tool (MGT) is being developed in collaboration between 10x and the Multilingual Community of Practice (CoP), as well as multi-agency working group members. Designed to encourage consistent translation of government content, MGT will help improve communication with the LEP population.

Executive Order 13166 requires federal agencies to provide information in languages other than English to their constituents. During our research, we’ve learned federal agencies have a desire to collectively agree upon and authoritatively promote translated terms by subject areas, such as health, benefits, or immigration. Through the effective management of shared multilingual glossaries and termbases, MGT can improve the consistency of translated government information across the agencies and raise the quality of communication with the LEP population. Consistency is key.

The MGT project will support each agency’s alignment with the goals of Executive Order 13166 and 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (21st Century IDEA), positioning MGT as a key component to language access standards. It also has the potential to reduce translation costs, improve translation efficiency, and provide visibility into term usage and decision-making.

MGT success relies heavily on cross-agency collaboration and relationship building. We are facilitating ongoing communications with translation teams across agencies within the public health domain, and have established partnerships that will sustain the MGT vision into the future. These partnerships are integral to a governance framework for the use and maintenance of multilingual terms and glossaries. The first chunk of work for MGT is developing a shared glossary for health terms in Spanish.

As MGT transitions from Phase 3 to Phase 4, we will be scaling the Spanish language health term glossary to other topic(s) and/or language(s), as well as further iterating on governance model, terminology data structure and management workflows.

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