Multicultural communication

The question isn't whether to communicate in-language. You already know the answer to that. The question is whether your in-language communication is doing anything.

Most of it isn't. Not because the translation is wrong, but because the thing being translated was designed for a different reader, sent through a channel that reader doesn't use, and signed by an organisation that reader has no particular reason to trust. Fix the words and you've fixed the smallest part of the problem.

Multicultural communication is what happens when you treat that audience as an audience rather than a compliance obligation: a message built for them, in a channel they're in, carried by someone they already listen to.

Start with the message, not the translation

Take a standard public health line. "Book your appointment online through the patient portal." In English it's clear. Translated into Khmer for an older audience in Springvale, where 75.3 per cent of residents speak a language other than English at home (ABS Census 2021), it's still clear and still useless, because the barrier was never the language. It was the portal.

The rewrite isn't a translation problem. It's a message problem, and it gets solved before anything reaches a translator. What can this person actually do next? Who do they ask? What number do they call, and will somebody answer it in their language? When the message is already right for its reader and only the language needs to change, that's our translation services.

That is the whole discipline in one line. If the culture is missing, what you have is a document, not a communication.

What we make

• Transcreation. The message rebuilt in-language so it does the same job, not the same words. How transcreation differs from translation.
• Campaigns end to end. Strategy, concepts, in-language copy, production, media planning and community distribution across every channel that matters, including the ones that don't show up in a standard media schedule. Campaign strategy.
• Multilingual video and audio. Subtitling, voice-over, animation and full production. For the Department of Education we localised a Family Assistance Law video series across 11 languages, complete with certified translation, professional voice-over and subtitling. See that project.
• Community engagement. Workshops, in-language facilitation, co-design sessions and the slow work of building a relationship with community leaders before you need one. Community engagement.
• Crisis and rapid response. When the timeline collapses and the information has to be right. Crisis communication.

Community-led beats community-targeted

There's a version of multicultural communication that treats communities as a distribution list. Write in English, translate into twelve languages, buy media against language groups, report reach.

It reaches people. It rarely moves them.

The alternative costs more up front and works better. For the Department of Health and Aged Care we designed and delivered a national multicultural public health campaign built around community-led messaging across 12 language groups, with community voices carrying the message rather than a department carrying it at them. It was named a finalist for Agency Campaign of the Year at the NSW Premier's Multicultural Communication Awards. How the campaign was built.

The difference is who is speaking. A vaccine message from a health department is information. The same message from a respected figure inside a community, in the language that community thinks in, is a recommendation.

Channels most media plans miss

Australia's community media is real, large and largely invisible to mainstream planning. In-language radio with genuinely loyal audiences. Print titles that get read cover to cover and passed between households. WeChat and Weibo for Chinese-language audiences, Zalo for Vietnamese, Viber for much of the former Soviet and Balkan diaspora, WhatsApp almost everywhere else.

Then the channels that aren't media at all: the temple, the mosque, the church, the sporting club, the grocer, the migrant resource centre, the settlement worker with 400 families in their phone. For the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission we adapted video content across 21 languages and put it in front of a potential audience of 365,000, largely through routes a standard buy would never have found. How IBAC reached them.

What good looks like when it's finished

A campaign is working when people who saw it can tell you what they're meant to do, in their own words, without prompting. Not recall of the ad. Recall of the action.

That's measurable, and measuring it is multicultural research. It's also the reason a campaign should never be the first thing you buy.