Kidsburgh is now available in multiple languages! Here are the details.

Photo above by Vonecia Carswell used by permission via Unsplash.

We are so excited to let you know that Kidsburgh has added language translation to our website.

Our goal at Kidsburgh is to help all families in southwestern Pennsylvania as they navigate the challenge of raising kids in this region. And as we reach our 15th year of serving Pittsburgh-region families, we’ve been asking ourselves: How might we reach even more families every day?

Through our work with school districts around the region and conversations with friends at organizations like Casa San Jose and Hello Neighbor, we realized: Pittsburgh is home to a fast-growing population of families who have immigrated from countries all around the world, and many of these parents are quite new to speaking English. If we could translate our site into their native languages, we can help these new Pittsburgh residents access all of the fresh content we publish each week and explore our deep archive of articles and resource guides about things like mental health services and educational opportunities in the Pittsburgh area.

With that in mind, we’re excited to announce that we’ve added the option of translation into 10 additional languages besides English. They are Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, Nepali, Pashto, Russian, Spanish, Swahili and Uzbek.

On a computer, you can switch to these options using the pull-down menu in the upper right-hand corner of your screen (see above). And on a mobile device. just tap the three bars in the upper right corner (see below) to access the pull-down menu.

We gave a lot of thought to how we might approach translating our content, and we realized one other important thing: If we hired people to do word-for-word translation, our budget would restrict us to translating only a handful of articles each month. We’d also be limited by how many languages we could afford to include.

That didn’t seem right, since we want to be of service to as many families as possible.

So we’ve opted to go with a Google translate plug-in, which will translate every bit of content on the site and allows us to include all of these 10 languages that are increasingly common here in Pittsburgh. The only downside? Google translate isn’t always perfect. Some of the translations may be useful, but not quite worded in other languages as they were in English.

We think that’s an OK tradeoff given how many more families we can reach, but we’d love your feedback on the quality of the translation. We’d also love to know if there are any additional languages you suggest we include.

Thank you for being part of the Kidsburgh community, and please do share this news with any families who might want to know about it.