Göteborgs Stad: no e-service is an island

Sweden has over 200 spoken languages. The City of Gothenburg were considering if they should make its digital channels available in more languages than Swedish, to give every resident equal service and accessibility to information. And if so, how would they do it?

As a consultant at Layer 10, I audited the city's website goteborg.se, with more than 10,000 pages and around 115 e-services, and its multilingual communication. The result was the report Ingen e-tjänst är en ö ("No e-service is an island").

The audit was done in line with the DOS Act (lagen om tillgänglighet till digital offentlig service, SFS 2018:1937), Sweden's law implementing the EU Web Accessibility Directive, pointing public sector websites to WCAG 2.1 level AA. I also weighed in the Language Act, the Local Government Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, the Minority Languages Act and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. And I learned that they give partly conflicting messages: Swedish is the main language in all contact with authorities, yet every resident should be able to take part in public life and democratic processes, whatever their first language.

Outcome: an extensive report with close to 40 recommendations in three areas (content and structure, technology and media, organization and networks), placed in an importance–difficulty matrix so the city could prioritize by impact and effort. I also presented the findings to stakeholders several times, in Swedish and English.

Why it matters for AI adoption: I advised caution with the site's machine translation widget, since an authority can't vouch for text it hasn't checked (and remember this was in 2020, before any AI translation services), and suggested a live-chat service to replace the little-used site search. Where automated language tools help people, and where an organization must still stand behind every word, is the same trade-off at the heart of AI adoption today.

What I did

1. Mapped the rules and best practice. Laws, the Language Council's guidance on multilingual communication (Språkrådet), the national web guidelines (webbriktlinjer.se), WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines, and W3C guidance on multilingual websites, including the technical side for search engines.

2. Analyzed the data. Google Analytics for January to September 2020, the city's 2019 website survey, and the results of its multilingual Covid-19 campaign on Facebook.

3. Asked the people doing the work. A survey of communications leads across the city's departments and companies (24 responses), and interviews with nine key people in web strategy, e-services, communications, the contact center, foresight and the regional interpreting service. Stockholm and Malmö shared their approaches by email.

What I found

• Every page is a front door. Only 14% of external visitors landed on the start page, but the language options (the translation widget, Finnish and sign language) only showed on category pages, not on pages for e.g. individual schools or units.
• English is the second language of the site. Close to 40% of visitors had their browser set to English, many of them on a desktop computer.
• E-services were in Swedish only, and only five e-service specialist worked among more than 600 general web editors.
• Nobody asked the audience. None of the 24 survey respondents had consulted the target groups (citizens, local community groups, etc.) on what to translate.
• Short, targeted content travels. a Covid-19 film in Arabic was seen by about 6,000 people, against some 13,000 visits from browsers set to Arabic in nine months.

The main recommendation was to involve the language/ethnic communities themselves, continuously, and to work iteratively: "think big, start small, act now". Other recommendations included clear entrances in English and the largest languages, information in easy Swedish for second-language speakers, glossaries of key terms, translating contact information and rights first, schema markup, and adapting content for voice search.

Methods and tools

Methods: accessibility audit (WCAG 2.1, the DOS Act), legal and best practice review, web analytics, survey, stakeholder interviews, benchmarking with other cities, importance–difficulty matrix, report writing and stakeholder presentations.

Tools: Google Analytics, Facebook ad reporting.

What I learned

Reaching people across languages is about much more than translating words. It is about trust, shared references and feeling seen: the most-liked post in the city's Covid-19 campaign was a Swedish one that named Eid al-Fitr alongside Ascension Day and school graduations. And since the laws pull in different directions, every choice about language is a choice about who you include, which an organization needs to be able to stand behind.