Is Your Vendor Supporting Communication Goals for Federal Projects?
Federal agencies rely on strong communication to deliver services and engage with the public. When multilingual communication is involved, the language services vendor you choose becomes part of that process. If your current partner isn’t meeting the mark, it can create inconsistent messaging.
Here’s what to consider when evaluating how well your vendor supports your communication goals:
Do They Understand the Requirements of Federal Work?
Federal projects come with expectations around transparency, timelines, and accessibility. Your language services partner should be familiar with standards like Title VI, Section 1557, and Executive Order 13166, as well as agency-specific guidance. If they aren’t asking the right questions about compliance or documentation, they may not be prepared to support your work at the level it requires.
Can They Deliver at the Scale and Speed You Need?
Some projects call for urgent updates across multiple languages or large-scale translation in a short time-frame. Others involve routine interpretation support that must be reliable day after day. Your vendor should have the staffing and experience to keep up without cutting corners. Ask how they manage large volumes, provide off-hours support, or respond to quick-turn requests. These are often the moments when reliability matters most.
Do They Provide the Right Level of Quality for Public Communication?
Communication for the public needs to be culturally appropriate and easy to understand. Machine translation may be acceptable for low-risk internal content, but outreach materials, legal notices, health information, or public announcements should be handled by certified linguists with subject matter experience. If quality checks feel inconsistent or you’re spotting too many corrections, it may be time for a new conversation.
Are Reporting and Oversight Built In?
A strong partner should provide clear reporting on usage, turnaround, and performance. This kind of transparency helps your team track results, anticipate future needs, and demonstrate compliance. It also gives insight into how language services are actually used across your programs. If reporting is limited or hard to access, it may be slowing down your ability to plan effectively.
Is Their Team Easy to Reach and Easy to Work With?
Day-to-day communication with your vendor makes a big difference. Delayed responses, unclear instructions, or limited points of contact can slow things down and increase the risk of missed details. If your agency works across departments or time zones, you need a vendor who can coordinate without making things more complicated.
Time to Re-evaluate? Propio Can Help.
Language services play a direct role in how your message is received. If your current vendor isn’t meeting expectations for federal work, it may be time to reassess.
Propio supports government agencies with language services designed around compliance, transparency, and public communication goals. Our team provides translation, interpretation, and accessibility support across hundreds of languages with the responsiveness federal projects depend on.
Let’s talk about how we can support your agency’s communication needs.
