Crisis Translation Maturity Model for Better Multilingual Crisis Communication

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Accurate, timely, and trusted communication in appropriate languages and cultural frames and through appropriate channels is vital to achieving principles of equity and inclusivity in crisis settings. However, organizations engaging in multilingual and multicultural crisis communication can struggle to know how to achieve such communication and assess their communicative capacities. Maturity models are well-established instruments to understand, review, and assess the processes and practices within organizations. This article discusses the development of a crisis translation maturity model to assist organizations to evaluate and improve their multilingual crisis communication efforts. The model presented here builds on a previously published iteration. This second iteration aimed to refine the model and was co-designed with stakeholders from 11 relevant organizations across two design workshops using a multiagency design-thinking methodology. Design thinking was chosen for this research because it is a collaborative approach to problem solving that prioritizes creativity and innovation, user-centeredness and involvement, iteration and experimentation, and interdisciplinary collaboration. This approach allowed us to co-design with stakeholders a model that considers crisis translation capabilities along 17 evaluative categories, with each category described across five maturity levels: ad hoc, repeatable, defined, managed, and optimizing. The categories are all defined in detail and the corresponding maturity levels are explained in a way that permits members of an organization to evaluate their current crisis translation capabilities and discern the changes that would be required to improve their level of crisis translation maturity. The objective of the research described in this article is to present a version of a crisis translation maturity model that will now be field-tested, customized, and refined. We plan to conduct further tests with stakeholders in authentic settings to produce improved versions of the model going forward.