Establishing French as a Common Language in the Workplace

Canada is a bilingual country, however, the higher proportion of English speakers can sometimes make French speakers feel that French is not a "common" language. To strengthen language inclusivity, RBC has to comply with a newly passed bill for businesses to ensure all content is available in both languages.

Our team was tasked with finding a way for employees to securely see all information in both English and French within RBC’s internal products.

How do we promote true language inclusivity as a company?

How can we reduce the translation workload for both French and English-speaking employees while enabling them to communicate freely in both languages?

Project Results:

✅ Led the design and research for a suite for 4 translation products

✅ Designed the first browser extension made by RBC.

✅ Collaborated with and got buy-in from 3 different departments.

✅ Used by 40,000+ employees with 60% of surveyed employees preferring them to competing translation products.

Team of 16:

1 Product Designer, 1 Business Analyst, 1 Project Manager, 6 Developers, 1 QA Analyst, 5 Key Business Stakeholders.

Research Outcomes

Research findings.

By addressing the needs of the two extremes within the bilingual spectrum, we could encompass nearly all possible use cases. I shared these findings with the team and we decided on a set of products that would cover all aspects of the translation experience at RBC:

Browser extension to translate all external websites (Slack, JIRA, confluence, etc.)
Translation integration into Microsoft Outlook
Machine translation feature within internal blog site
A website to translate documents and all other remaining text.

Content within external desktop apps are largely out of scope due to permission issues.

Design Principles

I started by establishing a set of principles that would help me build consistency across platforms.

Optimized for translation between only English and French, compared to other machine translations such as Google Translate, Bing Translator and DeepL.
French-first content approach to show inclusivity and spirit of this initiative.
Similar design language and copy across all platforms, unless it was incorporated within another product; Then, I have to follow that platform’s design.
Ensuring users understand what is machine-translated and what is human-translated.

Text and Document Translation with Custom Glossary

There are many instances where translation is needed, but we can't provide it in-platform due to technical or privacy constraints. These situations include desktop applications without translation options, text in image formats, PDFs without translation features, and chat messages.

Even when translation is available in other applications, there are challenges:

They don't accommodate RBC-specific terminology.
Topics related to inclusivity, such as pronouns (e.g., They/them) and disabilities, are frequently misrepresented or lost during translation.
RBC cannot fix translation errors as they are discovered.
Receivers of translated documents often struggle to determine whether a translation was done by a machine or a human, leading to potential misunderstandings among employees.
Internal/private data is compromised when using external products.

To address this, I designed a text and document translation website to fill any translation gaps and provide contextually accurate translations for internal RBC communication. This terminology is adjusted in the backend using a editable glossary based on stakeholder review.

Key screens for text translation

Key screens for document translation

Biggest Design Challenge:

One of the most challenging parts of this project was creating the glossary of terms to support custom changes. This glossary would let every department at RBC have their own version of English-French translations.

Why? Translations between language aren’t always 100% accurate. They’re situation, emotion and circumstance dependent. For example, when talking about people with disabilities, the insurance department might aim for accuracy so they can appropriately file claims; however, the accessibility department might aim for sensitivity so they can convey empathy when communicating. Different departments might prioritize accuracy, sensitivity, or other factors depending on their specific requirements.

The challenge was in establishing a hierarchy of these competing priorities and understanding how they would interact when multiple users attempted to modify translations. I collaborated with senior leadership to determine the department hierarchy and created a detailed flow chart to ensure that translations interacted appropriately based on these priorities.

One of the solutions:

While updating the glossary via a CSV file, a fourth “check data” step is added that lets users know how their actions are impacting the database and other departments. The users are given custom actions and responses that let them view, update, and understand the impact of their decisions. The updating process also discards translation entries both implicitly and explicitly so users do not submit false positive translations. This lets us (as the RBC translate team), create boundaries of what is acceptable and also lets users assess what is important to them.