Adrian City Commission considering translating city documents, videos

ADRIAN — In an effort to become more inclusive and aware of the needs of its city residents, the city of Adrian is investigating the potential to utilize language translation services for city documents and for its recorded city meetings.

Spanish would be the primary language the city would be looking to have as an option for translations, Adrian City Administrator Greg Elliott said.

The idea came from prior discussions between Adrian city commissioner Allen Heldt and city resident Rudy Flores.

“Having one-fifth of our population being Hispanic and making them feel included, making them feel welcome; I even want to go above and beyond when it comes to all of our public documents,” Heldt said, while pitching the concept of the translation service to the city commission at its May 1 premeeting work study session. “It’s a simple plug-and-play.”

Such a move on the part of the city is something Heldt described as both “progressive” and “inclusive” for Adrian city government.

“I view this as easy,” he continued. “... But there are kids who have to read documents from the city to their parents. That’s not OK with me.”

City documents, public notices and potentially even water bills, for example, could be translated from English into Spanish with approval from the city commission.

As the city looked into such a proposal, Elliott said, it was discovered that for a “fairly affordable price” the city could also have live translations of its virtual meetings, which are broadcast through the software Zoom. All meetings of Adrian boards and commissions where city business is being conducted and acted upon are recorded and streamed through Zoom, which people can access wherever they have an internet connection. The recording and streaming of the meetings is something the city of Adrian has continued since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Michelle Dewey, Adrian’s communications and marketing coordinator, looked into Heldt’s initial proposal and conducted follow-up investigations.

There were two companies she talked about in detail that provide translation services for agenda documents. These companies, and several others, she noted, tend to use Google Translate, a free program that has the ability to translate any document or text uploaded to it.

“It’s probably not going to be perfect every time, but for any document that we use that has full sentences, it should work pretty well,” Dewey said.

The city’s website and its Facebook page are both set up so that languages can be customized, she said.

“But our (city) documents you cannot do that with,” she said.

One of the companies Dewey investigated and talked about has the capacity to perform live audio and text translation during a meeting over Zoom.

It was estimated, she said, that at least 150 hours per year of all city board meetings are recorded and presented virtually. To translate that many hours of meetings, Dewey said, the yearly cost is anticipated to be about $8,500, which would allow up to 50 users at a time to use the live translation service.

If somebody should want to go back and rewatch a recorded city meeting, the recording itself will not be in another language besides English. Since the city uploads its recorded meetings to YouTube, people watching videos there can select captioning and translation offered through YouTube, Dewey said.

Commissioner Mary Roberts said the church she has been a member of has been translating its bulletins and website for more than 15 years into Spanish.

“Working in the schools even, we know that some of the documents are translated into Spanish,” Roberts said, while raising the question of why the city hadn’t thought of incorporating translation services years ago.

“That’s how easy it is,” Heldt said. “It’s about talking to the community, getting community input about what’s important to them, talking to the city administrator, getting support, bringing it for discussion and then more discussion, and figuring out how to do it.”

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Adrian considering translating city documents, videos