I spend a lot of time translating chat messages during Zoom meetings.

Not because someone asked me to. But because forty Chinese-speaking family child care providers are in the room, and the form they need to fill out only exists in English.

This has happened more times than I can count:

• A CPAC retreat interest form — English only
• Grant application guidance — English only
• Public comment forms at state workgroups — English only, until someone raised it
• Professional development sign-up — English only

Each time, the fix is the same. Someone notices. Someone says something. The organizers apologize, promise to translate by next week. And next time, sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t.

Translation is not a courtesy

When a system offers materials in one language, it’s making a design decision about who belongs.

Multilingual access isn’t about being nice. It’s about whether the people who do the work — who care for children twelve hours a day — can participate in the decisions that shape their profession.

In San Francisco, roughly one-third of family child care providers speak Chinese as their primary language. When I set up a Zoom meeting, I configure three interpretation channels. When a grant workshop happens in English, I organize a parallel Chinese-language session. When the state opens public comment, I check whether the form has been translated.

This isn’t extra. It’s the minimum.

What happens without it

Providers don’t disappear because they don’t care. They disappear because the system never made room for them to show up.

I’ve watched providers type their registry numbers into chat at 6pm after a full day of caring for children — because someone made it possible for them to understand what was being asked in their own language.

I’ve also watched providers leave meetings early, saying: “Oscar, you’re too busy. I’ll go. Thank you.” Behind every meeting I run are providers who stay past 8pm after full days of caregiving.

The cost excuse is gone

When I raised these issues in 2021 and 2022, translation was expensive and slow. That’s no longer true. AI translation tools today can handle a form, a flyer, or a meeting summary in seconds for almost nothing. The barrier to multilingual access has never been lower.

The harder problem now is quality assurance — making sure the translated message doesn’t misrepresent the original. A grant application translated with the wrong nuance can mislead a provider. A policy summary that loses context can cause confusion. The cost of translation is near zero. The cost of mistranslation is not.

That’s actually a better problem to have. It means we’ve moved from “can we translate?” to “can we translate well?” — and that’s a solvable problem if organizations commit to it.

The real work

The real work isn’t the translation itself. It’s the insistence that translation should not be an afterthought.

Every time I raise the question — “Can this form be translated?” — I’m not asking for a favor. I’m asking why it wasn’t designed that way from the start.

Belonging isn’t a feeling. It’s a language the system speaks — or doesn’t.