 Prompt Local
Issue No. 13 · Tuesday, October 27, 2026 · By Scott Olsen · 🎃 | ||||
|
PULL UP A CHAIR It is hard to believe October is almost over, Halloween is right around the corner, and we roll our clocks back an hour this weekend too, Daylight Saving Time ends Sunday, November 1 this year, so set those clocks back Saturday night before bed. Hope everyone has an amazing Halloween, and here's hoping everyone's costumes are as spectacular as I know they will be. Being able to actually communicate with the people walking into your office, or calling it, should be a real priority for all of us. I can tell you from my own time at the clerk's office, our Spanish-speaking staff were some of the most sought-after people in the building for exactly this reason, and on a day when nobody with that skill happened to be available, it genuinely changed how someone's visit went. Take a look at the suggestions below, one of them might be worth trying in your own office. Hope everyone has an awesome week. Feel free to send me your costume photos, I thought about running an actual contest this year and decided that was more work than I wanted to take on, but I genuinely appreciate anyone who puts real effort into a costume. Since it is the season for a scary story, I did not even have to go looking for one this year. Scroll down to the Rulebook, a county's own chatbot gave residents the wrong information about their car tags and property taxes, and the county had to publicly tell everyone not to trust it. No embellishment needed, that one is scary enough on its own. THIS WEEK'S PICK Serving non-English speakers without hiring interpretersHiring an interpreter for every meeting and translating every notice by hand is not realistic for most small offices. AI translation tools have gotten good enough to genuinely help, Google Translate, DeepL, and Wordly for live meetings. The tools are the easy part this week. The part worth real attention is a federal compliance picture that shifted in the last year and has not fully settled, which matters more here than which tool reads more naturally.
IF YOUR MEETINGS NEED LIVE TRANSLATION, NOT JUST WRITTEN NOTICES Wordly is real, live AI meeting translation, and at least one small city has actually used itConfirmed directly on the vendor's site: live translation and captioning in 60-plus languages, attendees join by QR code with no app to install, it works in person, hybrid, or fully virtual, and it can push captions straight to cable or PEG broadcast. Hillsboro, Oregon launched two-way live translation at a city council meeting in February 2025, residents testify in their own language and the council hears English, confirmed on the city's own site, not just Wordly's marketing. A few other named government customers only show up as logos on Wordly's own page, so treat those as vendor-claimed rather than independently confirmed. Pricing is published, not quote-only, starting around $1,500 a year for a 10-hour package, with volume and nonprofit discounts above that. Cost: published hour-based packages, roughly $1,500/year and up Setup: request a demo through wordly.ai IF YOU WANT THE MOST NATURAL-SOUNDING WRITTEN TRANSLATION DeepL reads more naturally, for a few dozen languages, not the 130-plus Google coversDeepL's reputation for more natural phrasing holds up, weakly, for major European language pairs like Spanish, French, and Portuguese. It does not hold up as a universal claim, because DeepL simply does not support many of the languages a US local government actually needs. Somali, for one, does not appear on DeepL's current language list. Before you pick a tool, check DeepL's actual current language list against what your own community needs, not against an assumption, and if your biggest need is a language DeepL does not cover, Google Translate becomes the real choice regardless of which one sounds smoother. DeepL Pro plans run roughly €7.49 a month for an individual up to €49.99 per user for a business plan; API pricing for a document or website integration specifically could not be confirmed directly, so do not trust a number for that without checking DeepL's own page first. Cost: Pro plans roughly €7.49 to €49.99/user/month; API pricing unconfirmed Setup: check language coverage for your specific community first, at deepl.com
HOW TO ACTUALLY USE IT 1. Find out which languages your actual community needs before picking a tool. Census data and your own front-counter staff both know this better than any vendor's marketing page, and it may rule out DeepL immediately. 2. Use the free Google Translate widget for routine, low-stakes notices first. Save a paid tool for recurring or high-volume needs where the free version is not good enough. 3. If you are considering live meeting translation, test it on a real, low-stakes meeting before you trust it for a contentious public hearing. 4. Build a human spot-check into anything legally significant. Machine translation getting most of a sentence right and getting a deadline or a legal term wrong both look identical on the page. The honest catch: Title VI of the Civil Rights Act still requires most federally funded local governments to provide meaningful access for residents with limited English proficiency, LEP for short, that statute has not changed. What has changed is federal enforcement posture. In July 2025, the Attorney General issued a memo rescinding the Justice Department's longstanding language-access guidance, suspending the federal LEP.gov resource site, and specifically endorsing AI translation as a cost-saving tool, while also arguing language proficiency alone is not a protected class under Title VI absent deliberate discrimination. That memo promised follow-up guidance within 180 days, which lands around January 2026. That guidance is now months overdue, and I found no DOJ notice, Federal Register filing, or news report from anywhere in 2026 confirming it was ever published. Civil rights advocates dispute the memo's legal theory entirely and say the underlying statute still requires access regardless. None of this is settled. Do not let anyone, a vendor or otherwise, tell you AI translation alone checks the Title VI box for your office, and do not assume the opposite either. Confirm your office's current obligations with your own counsel before this becomes your whole language-access plan. THE RULEBOOK · TWO RULES WORTH A GLANCE What changed that affects how your office can use AI. Short, plain, and sourced. The part that keeps you out of the newspaper. Tagged Local for a city or county action, State for a change at the state level, Federal for a change at the federal level that reaches your desk. Both items below are a bit older than the usual window, a thin news week for brand-new state and local AI action, but both are new to this newsletter and worth knowing.
ONE MORE QUICK WIN Know who owns this decision, and write down whyFederal guidance here is genuinely unsettled, and may stay that way a while. That is exactly why your office should not be running on an unwritten assumption. Find out who is actually responsible for your language-access decisions, and whether your current approach, AI translation, a human reviewer, or both, is written down anywhere with a reason behind it. If the honest answer is "nobody" and "no," that gap is the real win to fix this week, regardless of what Washington eventually publishes. | ||||
|
Know someone at another city or county who could use this? Forward it over.
Until next week, 🎃 Scott Olsen, CGCIO Former CIO with eleven years in Florida local government Practical guidance for local government, not legal or procurement advice. |