Our realities differ from place to place, culture to culture and person to person. It’s for this reason that we must make the most of our localization efforts to meet people where they are, and by doing so, achieve equity and equality.
Transcription
Priya Sam 00:06
Thank you so much, Colman. I'm really excited to be back here. As you mentioned, it was a really great start to the day. And for those of you who weren't here earlier, my name is Priya Sam. I'm a solution engineer at Slack and a former news anchor as well with a passion for diversity, equity and inclusion. Welcome to our lock talk panel on how localization can help achieve global equity. I'm so thrilled today to be joined by three incredible panelists all with different areas of expertise. So we have Peggy Liao, who is a language access program and policy specialist with the City of Seattle, we have Stella Marie Hodgkin Paris, she is the chief Language Services Officer at Clear Gold Global, also known as translators without borders. And we have Sarah prasch, the Director of International SEO at Argos mutual. Pardon me, Argos, multilingual, thank you all so much for being here. So since our topic, yeah, great to have all of you. And since our topic today is global equity. Let's start with the most recent global event to impact all of us the COVID 19 pandemic, of course, so this is a question for all of you. How did the pandemic impact the work that you do? And Peggy, I'll start with you.
Peggy Liao 01:25
Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. And as you mentioned, I work for the City of Seattle, it's a local government and the audience that I serve predominantly are immigrants or international migrants. So COVID really impacted as I will say, it's the cultural and perspective shift. And it the the perspective from the government side is that language axis or localization or translation, or communicating in other languages other than English, it's not about it's not a nice to have item to have on your press release or just like a little button on your website, it is about life and death issue. And if we do not have the piece where we talk about language axes or localization, the consequences may be really negative and disaster. And then another perspective that also shift is from the community side. And I am myself also an immigrant, so I know how the environment and the culture that we live in as an immigrant, I will be feeling that it's not my own place to ask for help. Or as an immigrant, it is on me to learn English to feel like I should be able to understand everything that's in English, technical or capital.
