What's ethnic and foreign to you is native to someone else

There is no such thing as a foreign language. There are only languages you don't speak.

The word ethnic gets used in this country to mean everyone who isn't the default. It's a strange word for a population where nearly half were born overseas or have a parent who was, where more than 300 languages are spoken at home, and where the second most common language in a suburb can be something the marketing plan never considered (ABS Census 2021).

What's ethnic and foreign to you is native to someone else. That isn't a slogan. It's a description of how communication actually fails.

The failure is rarely linguistic

Organisations translate and then wonder why nothing moved. The translation was fine. The message assumed a reader who had a myGov login, a printer, an appointment slot during business hours and a reason to trust the logo at the top of the page.

None of that is a language problem. All of it gets carried, faithfully, into eleven languages, and eleven communities receive a well-translated document that has nothing to say to them.

Communication is culture and culture is communication

Culture is not a layer applied over a message. It's the thing that decides whether the message means anything. Who is allowed to say this. What tone reads as respect and what reads as condescension. Whether the person you addressed is the person who makes the decision. What the silence after a question means.

Get that wrong and the words don't matter. Get it right and people forgive a great deal about the words.

Native, not translated at

The standard we hold is whether a person receives something in their own language and it feels like it was made for them. Not adapted for them. Not translated at them. Made for them.

That's harder, slower and more expensive than the alternative, and it's the only version that works. It requires knowing who you're speaking to before you decide what to say, which is why we do research. It requires people from those communities doing the work, which is why we build networks instead of buying capacity. It requires saying so when a message can't be adapted and has to be rebuilt.

Why it matters

A woman in Springvale reads a health notice and knows what to do next. A tradesman in Fairfield understands the safety instruction the first time. A father in Lakemba fills in the form correctly and doesn't lose eight weeks to a rejection. That's the whole point. Everything else is method.

Australia has been multicultural for longer than most of its institutions have communicated like it. We think that's a solvable problem, and we've spent since 2011 solving it one organisation at a time.