Vietnamese, Russian latest languages to be added to RTD's website, Next Ride

Language access is intrinsic to RTD’s mission to make lives better through connections. Regardless of someone’s preferred language or cultural background, all customers deserve the ability to reach the places where they live, work and play without language acting as a barrier to accessing transit. As part of its Language Access Program, RTD is now providing Vietnamese language translation for all content on the agency’s website and, this month, will add accessibility in this language to trip planner and Next Ride.

By May, Russian translation will be deployed to RTD’s website and Next Ride. With English, Spanish and Chinese already available, content will be offered then in five languages on both platforms. Customers can easily select languages other than English by clicking the “translate page” option in the upper right corner of the RTD website and selecting the preferred language from the drop-down menu.

The goal of RTD’s Language Access Program, said Transit Equity Specialist Dani McLean, “is to make sure that everyone can use our services and programs regardless of their spoken language.” This project ensures compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects people from discrimination based on race, color or national origin in programs or activities. It also promotes equity and inclusion by removing language barriers that prevent limited-English populations from using RTD services.

The specific languages chosen for the website and Next Ride project take into account an analysis of language assistance needs of limited English proficient (LEP) individuals in RTD’s service area. Sixty-eight percent of the LEP population are Spanish speakers, followed by Vietnamese (4.4%) and Chinese (4.2%). The full analysis is published in RTD’s 2022-2025 Language Access Plan, which details a wealth of information about the diverse populations RTD serves.

Supplemented with data from multiple sources, the analysis revealed 21 languages in the Denver metro region that qualify as safe harbor languages. The safe harbor provision has been defined by the federal government as 5% of or 1,000 persons in the population to be served, whichever is less. More languages could be added to RTD’s communications platforms in the future as various non-English-speaking populations grow.

Work on adding diverse languages to RTD’s website and Next Ride began in October 2023, a month before the agency introduced a refreshed website, Digital Communications Manager Andrea Sucherman said. The team began with Spanish. Translations are made possible through the use of a platform called DeepL, a neural machine translation service she had used before.

“DeepL uses AI (artificial intelligence) to do translations on the fly,” Sucherman said. “We have integrated the website and Next Ride with that platform, and that's how you know the platform is taking the English and then converting it into the other language. Our systems consume that information, and that's how the translations happen on the site.”

Sucherman gives heavy credit for this project to front end developer Peter Washington, who also worked with full stack developer Joseph Benbella, an IT colleague, to create a system that translates Service Alerts on Next Ride. This request originated with Civil Rights and was communicated to Customer Care as a need.

“A lot of thought went into choosing the platform and the overall process of how we would execute this work on our website and Next Ride,” Sucherman said. “From a development standpoint, it was a lot of trial and error: We start with a test environment, set up the language in DeepL, apply the language to the website and test heavily. It's not just the content on the site, it's other features – like the Customer Comments form that’s running Salesforce – that have to be translated as well.”

Once the team solidified its work with Spanish, she said, they applied the same approach to subsequent languages that were added, first on the website, then on Next Ride.

This project is important, McLean said, because it affirms the importance of ideas that extend beyond transit equity – concepts such as mobility justice and language justice. “Language access is part of that,” she said. “It's about including people who have been historically excluded simply by the fact that they don't speak English. I’m happy that we are able to put budget dollars, to put resources and people power, toward it to make it happen.”

This work matters, Sucherman added, because it provides customers with another avenue to access the valuable RTD information they need.

“Whether it’s an upcoming event or an alert for a train or a bus, or a schedule change, we want to get that information quickly to our customers in the way that they like to receive it,” she said. “We want to give the opportunity for customers to read content in their preferred language.”