Scaling a language strategy
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) serves consumers with limited English proficiency, many of whom face additional barriers to navigating the U.S. financial system. While the CFPB recognized multilingual content as a strategic priority, its translation and publishing process was manual and difficult to scale.
My team was asked to identify a sustainable approach for delivering high-quality multilingual content across thousands of pages, balancing quality, speed, cost, and long-term maintainability.
About the work
Challenge
Develop a scalable multilingual strategy that enables the CFPB to expand language access while maintaining quality and manageable workflows for content teams.
Project team
User researcher (me)
Product manager
Content strategist
My lead responsibilities
User research
Strategic communication
I also contributed to…
Workshop facilitation
Defining success
We began by reviewing previous multilingual work done by teams at the CFPB. Earlier research showed that professionally translated content helped consumers better understand financial information and increased their trust in the CFPB.
Working with stakeholders, we distilled those findings into a shared set of project goals and success criteria. Aligning early on what success would look like for the project helped us ensure we addressed both organizational priorities and user needs as we worked.
Workshop with stakeholders to articulate project goals
Understanding the current workflow
To understand the current translation and publishing experience, I interviewed the team responsible for a recent launch of multilingual pages on CFPB’s site.
Their publishing process involved numerous manual handoffs, disconnected documents, and time-consuming quality assurance. One recurring theme emerged: reviewing translated pages before publication was stressful because content owners often couldn't read the target language themselves.
I synthesized the team's experience into a journey map that visualizes the end-to-end translation and publishing workflow, making pain points visible to both the project team and stakeholders. The artifact became a guide for evaluating alternative approaches.
Journey map I created to capture the current experience of publishing multilingual content on CFPB’s site
“There were a lot of moving parts and a lot of organization and version control was needed. Arabic key terms was missed in the process. I made the content docs, just missed sending them in the mega email.”
Exploring scalable models
To identify scalable approaches to multilingual content, we interviewed other government agencies, researched machine translation methods, and explored proxy translation.
Publishing
To explore options for publishing multilingual content in our CMS, we researched internationalization packages available for our CMS. We installed a localize package on a demo server to better understand the workflow it offered. And we considered changes to our site’s information architecture that would be necessary to support a large volume of multilingual pages.
We also investigated non-CMS approaches. Some of the city governments we spoke to used a method called proxy translation, in which a third-party vendor crawled their site content and produced a translated mirror of it. The translated mirror was hosted on a separate server and presented to visitors in the browser. In this workflow, they used machine translation, which provided near-instant translation and publishing when they made a change to English content.
Translation
We learned that several city governments used machine translation, such as Google Translate API, without human review. We explored machine translation options and connected DeepL to a demo server to try it out.
We also talked to a federal agency that employed an in-house linguistic staff of 13 employees to handle human translation. The agency developed a content prioritization system to inform vital and non-vital content to translate and developed glossaries to ensure consistent translations across content.
And we talked to a proxy translation vendor who offered translation via human, machine, or a combination of the two. They were developing an “adaptive” translation model in which human translation would be supplemented by a machine-learning model trained on the existing human translations.
Our research helped us dig into the end-to-end multilingual content experience including translation technology, governance, publishing workflows, and content operations. And it helped us consider key tradeoffs between quality, speed, and maintenance.
The result
We synthesized our findings into a set of strategic recommendations for CFPB leadership.
First, we recommended piloting proxy translation to rapidly expand multilingual content while reducing the operational burden of managing translated pages within the CMS.
Second, we recommended conducting a comprehensive content audit to identify content owners, improve plain language, retire outdated pages, and establish a prioritization framework to distinguish content needing human translation from content appropriate for machine translation.
These recommendations provided the CFPB with a roadmap for building a scalable multilingual content program capable of expanding access to trusted financial guidance while balancing quality, cost, and long-term sustainability.
Final presentation and recommendations
