Kristen Veit, Director of Community Engagement Strategy at coUrbanize, wanted to empower more people where they live and work to share their feedback on community projects. “When our customers listen to community members and incorporate their feedback, it’s a win-win: better projects get built and there is higher local support.“ said Kristen. "Our customers, real estate developers and city planners, post frequent updates and community members post comments daily. Therefore, we needed a solution that would allow translations to happen in real time." - Kristen Veit, Dir. of Community Engagement Strategy
“我们的客户，包括房地产开发商和城市规划师，会频繁发布更新信息，社区成员也每天都会发表评论。因此，我们需要一个能够实现实时翻译的解决方案。”——社区参与策略总监 Kristen Veit
When coUrbanize came to Localize they had two specific challenges. First, they needed a platform where the specific needs for each city project plan could easily be met. Next, the diverse language requirements needed to be quickly translated because community members and project teams are communicating in real time. The solution coUrbanize created was the Language Equity Plan (LEP) to ensure that people whose primary language was not English could have a say in what was built in their neighborhoods.
They determined that if a secondary language has a saturation level of 5% or more in a given community, the project on coUrbanize would be translated in those corresponding languages. This enables more people to participate on the platform without a language barrier that often stands in their way.
The newly launched Language Equity Plan (LEP) ensured that community minorities can have a say in what gets built in their neighborhoods. “Localize is a scalable solution that allows us to offer the right translations for all of our customers. We're the only community engagement platform that is currently offering this,” said Kristen.
Translation is now standard across all coUrbanize projects for languages that meet the threshold of their Language Equity Plan. The combination of quality AI translations as their foundation with an option to utilize human translators to proofread these translations was a core reason coUrbanize chose to work with Localize.
As their business grows, they continue to use Localize more and more to provide high-quality translations for all projects on coUrbanize.
So far, coUrbanize has successfully launched 32 community projects using 25 unique languages to reach the various native languages within each community. “We’ve been able to fully roll out our Language Equity Plan. We can now offer translations to even our smallest municipal and affordable housing customers. We’re excited to take this big step toward a more equitable and inclusive community engagement process.” There has been a remarkable response to the Language Equity Plan initiative. To date, coUrbanize has created over 600,000 translations to get the word out, and it’s working.
