CALD Communications Guide: How to reach Australia's Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities

CALD stands for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse. You'll find it in every government tender document, every multicultural affairs framework, every piece of health promotion reporting in Australia. It's the standard term across government, health, education, and community services for people whose cultural backgrounds, languages, and ethnic identities differ from the Anglo-Celtic majority.

The term is distinctly Australian. The UK doesn't use it. Neither does Canada or the US. It replaced NESB (Non-English Speaking Background), which had been the default since the 1980s. NESB defined communities by what they lacked. CALD was an attempt to describe what they bring: cultural depth and linguistic range, not a deficit of English.

It's worth knowing that CALD has its critics. The Diversity Council of Australia has proposed CARM (Culturally and Racially Marginalised), arguing that CALD papers over the role of race and racism in people's lived experience. The Australian Government Style Manual accepts CALD for specialist audiences but recommends naming specific communities in public-facing work. "Arabic-speaking communities in Western Sydney" tells a reader something. "CALD communities" tells them almost nothing.

We use CALD throughout this guide because it's the term procurement documents and reporting frameworks require. But the principle holds: the more specific you can be about who you're trying to reach, the better your communications will work.

The 2021 ABS Census counted 5.5 million people using a language other than English at home. That's 22.3% of a total population of 25.4 million. The number has climbed at every Census: 4.1 million in 2011, 4.8 million in 2016, 5.5 million in 2021.

Over 350 languages are spoken across the country. The five most common after English are Mandarin (685,274 people), Arabic (367,159), Vietnamese (320,758), Cantonese (295,281), and Punjabi (239,033). Punjabi grew by more than 80% between 2016 and 2021. Nepali speakers more than doubled. These aren't stable numbers. They're accelerating.

More than 7.5 million people (29.3%) were born overseas. Over half the population (51.5%) were either born overseas or have at least one parent who was. India overtook China and New Zealand between the two most recent Census counts to become the third-largest country of birth after Australia and England.

And then there's the figure that should shape every communications decision: 852,706 people reported that they don't speak English well or at all. For those Australians, an English-only letter from Centrelink, an English-only vaccination booking system, an English-only bushfire warning doesn't underperform. It doesn't exist.

A government team in Canberra looking at national Census data will see Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Punjabi. That's accurate nationally. It's useless locally.

In Greater Dandenong in Melbourne's south-east, more than 60% of residents speak a language other than English at home. The top languages there are Vietnamese, Khmer, Mandarin, Dari, and Sinhalese. In Fairfield in Western Sydney, it's Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Arabic, Vietnamese, Cantonese, and Spanish. In the City of Stirling in Perth, it's Mandarin, Italian, Cantonese, Arabic, and Vietnamese. Different cities. Different suburbs. Completely different language profiles.

This is why every campaign we deliver starts with local data pulled from the ABS at the local government area level, not national averages. A campaign designed for Sydney's Arabic-speaking communities won't land in Melbourne's Punjabi-speaking suburbs. The languages are different. The media channels are different. The cultural context is different. LEXIGO's language pages provide language-specific context across 171 languages, from speaker counts and script systems to translation considerations that affect how content needs to be adapted.

English-only communication isn't a neutral default. It's a decision. And it's a decision that excludes a growing share of the population from services they're entitled to.

The Service Delivery Problem

Government services exist to reach all Australians. When someone can't understand a tenancy notice, a court document, a discharge summary, or an emergency alert, the service has failed. The person hasn't failed to learn English. The service has failed to communicate.

The Australian Government's Multicultural Access and Equity framework requires departments to assess whether their services reach CALD communities. Victoria has its Language Services Policy. Western Australia updated theirs in 2020. NSW runs the Multicultural Health Communication Service. Every state and territory has some version of this expectation. The policy frameworks exist. The gap is in execution.

What Goes Wrong When It Goes Wrong

We've seen government health campaigns translated into 12 languages and distributed through English-language media channels. The translations were accurate. Nobody in the target communities ever saw them.

We've seen consent forms translated word-for-word from English legal language into Vietnamese, producing sentences that were grammatically correct and completely incomprehensible to a Vietnamese speaker without a law degree.

We've seen a public health campaign use imagery that was culturally appropriate for English-speaking audiences and deeply offensive to the Arabic-speaking community it was supposed to reach.

COVID-19 exposed every gap. In 2020 and 2021, infection rates spiked in suburbs with high CALD populations across Melbourne's north and west and in Western Sydney. The pattern was consistent: wherever multilingual communications were slowest to deploy, outcomes were worst. We supported the Victorian Government's multilingual COVID-19 website across 56 languages. The lesson from that work was blunt. Speed and cultural appropriateness aren't extras you add if the budget allows. They're the intervention.

The Commercial Reality

Framing this purely as compliance misses something. More than five million people make purchasing decisions, healthcare choices, and service preferences in a language other than English. Drive through Springvale or Lakemba or Inala and you'll see bank branches with in-language signage, medical practices with multilingual reception staff, car dealerships running advertising in community languages. They're not doing it because a policy told them to. They're doing it because it works.

Government faces the same equation. Campaigns that reach CALD audiences see higher service uptake, better health outcomes, stronger compliance. CSA Research's "Can't Read, Won't Buy" study found that 76% of consumers prefer information in their own language. 40% won't engage at all with English-only content. The question isn't whether CALD communications are worth the investment. It's whether you can justify not making them.

Most CALD communications briefs we receive start the same way: "We need this translated into these languages." A list of languages. A PDF attachment. A deadline.

That's not a strategy. That's a production order. And it's why so much government CALD communications work technically gets done but doesn't actually reach anyone.

Here's how the work needs to happen.

1: Start With Local Data, Not Internal Assumptions

The most common mistake is choosing languages based on what someone in the team assumes the local community looks like. We've worked with health promotion teams in South-East Melbourne who were confident they needed Mandarin and Vietnamese. The Census data for their catchment showed Dari and Hazaragi speakers had grown 200% since 2016 while Mandarin had plateaued. The communities with the greatest need weren't even on the brief.

Pull language data from the ABS at the LGA level. Cross-reference it with English proficiency data. A community of 10,000 Mandarin speakers where 95% report speaking English well has very different communication needs from a community of 2,000 Dari speakers where 40% report not speaking English well. The first group might benefit from in-language digital content. The second group might need audio and video because literacy in their own language is also low.

2: Understand the Audience Beyond the Language

Language gets you to the right people. It doesn't guarantee the message lands. A translated brochure that assumes everyone uses the internet won't reach a community where family elders make decisions offline. A cancer screening campaign that uses direct, clinical language might work for English-speaking audiences and alienate communities where illness carries stigma and health decisions involve the entire family.

This is where translation and transcreation diverge. Translation converts language. Transcreation adapts the message for cultural context: different imagery, different metaphors, different assumptions about how people make decisions. A campaign about aged care options that assumes adult children will search a government website falls apart in communities where that decision sits with a family elder who doesn't go online.

We developed the Native Experience framework over two decades of government work to address exactly this gap. The principle is straightforward: effective multicultural communication doesn't translate words. It recreates the experience a native speaker would have if the content had been created in their language and culture from the start. The full methodology, including audience research, community consultation, and co-design processes, is detailed across the ten chapters of The Authenticity Advantage, available free on our site.

3: Plan for Channels, Not Just Formats

Government comms teams default to translated PDFs. PDFs have their place. They're rarely sufficient on their own.

Australia has over 200 ethnic print publications covering 47 communities. Multicultural radio runs on more than 100 stations. Paid and streaming television reaches audiences in Mandarin, Vietnamese, Filipino, Arabic, Italian, and Greek. Then there's the digital layer: WeChat and Weibo for Mandarin-speaking audiences, WhatsApp groups that are the connective tissue for South Asian and Middle Eastern communities, Facebook pages run by community organisations in every language group.

For audiences with low literacy in their native language, and this is more common than most briefs acknowledge, particularly among older migrants and people from refugee backgrounds, audiovisual content isn't a nice-to-have. It's the only format that works. Multilingual video, animation, and audio recordings reach people that written materials can't. Our work with government clients regularly includes multilingual video production and culturally adapted visual assets alongside traditional translation for exactly this reason.

4: Choose Languages Strategically

You don't need every language spoken in your catchment. You need the languages where the community is large enough to justify the investment, where English proficiency is low enough that English-only content creates a genuine barrier, and where the stakes are high enough that misunderstanding has real consequences.

For most government campaigns, 8 to 15 languages covers the vast majority of the non-English-speaking population in any given region. In Greater Dandenong, that might be Vietnamese, Mandarin, Dari, Arabic, and Sinhalese. In Blacktown, Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi, Punjabi, and Filipino. The list changes suburb to suburb. The data drives it.

Don't ignore growth rates. Punjabi grew by 80% between the last two Census counts. Nepali more than doubled. These communities are concentrated in specific suburbs, growing fast, and frequently underserved. Checking growth rates alongside absolute numbers keeps your language selection ahead of demographic shifts rather than behind them.

5: Build Quality Into the Process

NAATI certification is the national standard for translation quality. NAATI-certified translators have passed rigorous testing in their language pairs. For government work, this isn't optional. It's a compliance baseline.

Beyond individual translator qualifications, look at provider-level quality systems. ISO 17100 covers translation quality management. ISO 27001 covers information security, which matters when you're handling sensitive government data. ISO 9001 covers general quality management. Triple certification across all three is uncommon in the Australian market.

A robust process includes independent checking by a second qualified translator. For high-stakes communications, community validation testing with members of the target audience catches cultural issues that even the best translator might miss. The most expensive translation project we've ever seen wasn't the one with the highest word count. It was the one that had to be redone because nobody tested it with the community before distribution.

Government communications teams need to understand this distinction before commissioning any CALD project. Getting it wrong produces materials that are linguistically accurate and culturally tone-deaf.

Translation converts text from one language to another while preserving meaning. It's the right choice for legal documents, official forms, consent forms, terms and conditions, and anything where precision matters more than persuasion. The Translation Services Guide covers the full process, including NAATI requirements, ISO standards, and provider selection.

Transcreation adapts the message for the cultural context of the audience. Different imagery. Different narrative structure. Different calls to action. Sometimes a completely reworked approach. A bowel cancer screening campaign that uses direct, matter-of-fact messaging might work brilliantly for English-speaking audiences. In communities where cancer carries deep stigma and discussing bodily functions with strangers is culturally unacceptable, the same campaign needs a fundamentally different approach to achieve the same outcome: getting people screened.

The practical rule: translate when accuracy is the priority. Transcreate when behaviour change is the goal. Most government campaigns need both. Translated fact sheets for the accurate information. Transcreated advertising to drive awareness and action.

Health is where the stakes are highest. When people don't understand their diagnosis, their medication, or their treatment pathway, the consequences are clinical.

There's a common assumption in health communications that bilingual patients are adequately served by English-language materials. The research doesn't support this. People who report speaking English "well" in the Census still revert to their first language when processing complex or high-stress medical information. A bilingual professional might navigate their entire workday in English. When they're reading a pathology report or comparing surgical options, they're processing that decision in the language they grew up with. Speaking a language and thinking in it are two very different things.

Literacy Complicates Everything

Translating a 12-page health booklet into Dari doesn't help a patient who never had formal education in Dari. Many CALD community members, particularly older migrants and people from refugee backgrounds, have low literacy in their native language as well as in English. This isn't an edge case. It's a significant portion of the audience that most health communication briefs don't account for.

For these audiences, audiovisual content is essential. Animated explainer videos. Audio recordings in language. Visual guides that minimise reliance on text. Community health workers and bilingual health educators who can present information verbally and answer questions in language.

What COVID-19 Taught Us

The pandemic didn't create gaps in Australia's CALD health communications infrastructure. It exposed gaps that had been there for years. Infection rates spiked in high-CALD suburbs. Multilingual information lagged behind English by days, sometimes weeks. The correlation between delayed in-language communications and poorer health outcomes was stark and repeatable across every state.

The same dynamic plays out in cancer screening campaigns, mental health awareness, chronic disease management, and maternal health. Community co-designed resources, tested with target audiences before distribution, consistently outperform materials that are simply translated from English. The investment in getting it right at the research and design stage pays for itself many times over in downstream engagement. Organisations like the Settlement Council of Australia have demonstrated this repeatedly across national health campaigns.

Not every translation company does CALD communications. Translation is one component. The full capability set is broader, and the differences matter when you're spending public money on work that needs to reach communities most organisations struggle to reach.

Here's what to evaluate.

NAATI-certified translators are non-negotiable for government work. Ask whether the provider uses certified translators for every language pair, not just the major ones. Ask how they handle languages where NAATI certification isn't available. There are more of those than you'd expect.

ISO certification at the provider level tells you about systems, not just people. ISO 17100 covers translation quality management. ISO 27001 covers information security. ISO 9001 covers general quality management. Triple certification is uncommon in the Australian market.

Language range matters more than most briefs acknowledge. A provider covering 20 languages handles the established community languages. They'll fall short when you need Hazaragi, Dinka, Karen, or Tigrinya. Check whether they can service emerging communities, not just established ones.

Cultural capability beyond translation is the line that separates a translation vendor from a CALD communications partner. Can they advise on cultural adaptation? Do they have transcreation capability? Can they produce multilingual video, animation, and designed assets? Can they run community consultation and co-design processes? A provider that only converts text from one language to another is half the solution.

Community networks are what make the difference between a campaign that's technically correct and a campaign that actually reaches people. Providers with established relationships with ethno-specific community organisations, community leaders, and multicultural media networks deliver work that lands. Providers without those relationships deliver files.

Government experience means the provider already understands security clearances, data handling requirements, accessibility standards, and reporting expectations. Providers with existing government panel contracts move faster and create fewer compliance issues.

LEXIGO holds triple ISO certification (ISO 17100, ISO 27001, ISO 9001), works across 171 languages with NAATI-certified translators, and has delivered CALD communications for more than 50 government clients at state and federal level. The Translation Services Guide covers the full procurement framework.

Commissioning CALD communications and measuring whether they worked are two different disciplines. Most programmes do the first competently and skip the second entirely.

Track Outcomes by Language Group

Measure service uptake among target language communities before and after the campaign. If you're running a translated cancer screening campaign, measure screening rates among the specific language groups you targeted. Don't report "CALD" as a single category. A campaign can be working for Mandarin speakers and failing completely for Somali speakers. Aggregate data hides that.

Listen to the Community

Quantitative data tells you what happened. Community feedback tells you why. Did the tone land? Did the imagery resonate? Did the distribution channels actually reach the intended audience? Did the community trust the source? These questions can only be answered through consultation, focus groups, and community validation testing. We've built a structured approach to pre-campaign and post-campaign community research over two decades of government work, detailed in The Authenticity Advantage.

Treat Measurement as a Loop

The best CALD communications programmes treat every campaign as input for the next one. Language selections get refined. Channels get tested and adjusted. Community relationships deepen. This is why working with a provider who has long-term relationships with CALD communities matters more than choosing whoever quotes the lowest price for a single project.

Understanding how Australia talks about its diverse communities matters if you're writing policy, commissioning research, or developing communications frameworks.

NESB was the standard from the 1970s through the 1990s. It was functional but deficit-framed: it described people by the language they didn't speak. CALD, which gained broad adoption in the late 1990s and early 2000s, acknowledged cultural richness alongside linguistic difference. But it still collapses extraordinarily diverse communities into a single administrative bucket.

CARM, proposed by the Diversity Council of Australia, centres race and systemic marginalisation. It hasn't replaced CALD in government usage. It may not. But it reflects a growing recognition that language diversity and racial discrimination are connected, not separate.

For day-to-day work, CALD remains the term in procurement documents, reporting frameworks, and policy guidelines. In community-facing communications, the Australian Government Style Manual's advice holds: be specific. "Vietnamese-speaking communities in Footscray" tells a reader something useful. "CALD communities" doesn't.

Translation Services Guide: LEXIGO's companion pillar page on commissioning translation work in Australia, covering NAATI certification, ISO standards, and quality assurance.

The Authenticity Advantage: Mark Saba's 10-chapter book on Native Experience Marketing, available free online. Covers audience research, community consultation, co-design, and the full methodology behind effective multicultural communications.

What Is NAATI Certification?: A complete guide to NAATI certification requirements for government procurement teams.

Human Translation vs Machine Translation: When to use human translators, when machine translation supports the workflow, and why the distinction matters for CALD communications.

ABS Cultural Diversity Census Data: The primary source for language demographics, country of birth, and English proficiency data at national, state, and LGA level.

Beyond Translation: The Native Experience Podcast: Conversations with CALD communications practitioners, government leaders, and community advocates.

LEXIGO Glossary: Definitions of key terms including CALD, NESB, CARM, transcreation, and more.