A translated flyer and a trusted message are not the same thing. Here’s what the data says about reaching LA’s communities — and what it takes to actually do it.
The following article was written by the Lee Andrews Group.
Los Angeles County is home to speakers of more than 200 languages — and according to the Los Angeles Unified School District, students alone speak over 150 languages across its classrooms. Nearly one in four LA County residents speaks English less than “very well,” according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. For Spanish speakers specifically, that figure is 42% countywide.
Numbers like these aren’t abstract. They determine whether a resident understands a transit construction notice, knows a public meeting is happening, or feels like a city agency is actually talking to them — not past them.
That’s the gap a lot of outreach efforts fall into: treating multilingual communication as a translation task instead of a trust-building one. Running an English flyer through translation software and printing it in Spanish, Korean, or Mandarin checks a box. It rarely moves a community.
The Difference Between Translating and Reaching People
Translation converts words. Outreach has to convert understanding — and understanding depends on more than vocabulary.
A flyer that’s grammatically perfect in Spanish can still fail if:
- It’s written at a reading or formality level that doesn’t match the audience
- It uses government or technical terms with no real-world equivalent
- It’s distributed somewhere that community doesn’t already trust or visit
- It ignores generational, regional, or cultural differences within the same language (the Spanish that resonates in Boyle Heights isn’t always the Spanish that resonates in a different part of the county)
- It arrives without a messenger the community already knows
This is the distinction between language access and community engagement. Language access is a compliance requirement — and an important one. Community engagement is what actually gets people to show up, respond to a survey, or trust that an agency has their interest in mind.
What the Research Shows
This isn’t just a Los Angeles issue, but it’s an acute one here. Federal civil rights researchers estimate that 26 million Americans have limited English proficiency — and a 2025–2026 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights investigation found that gaps in language access continue to limit meaningful participation in government services nationwide, despite decades of civil rights protections requiring agencies to provide it.
The pattern shows up locally too. More than half of LA County’s Vietnamese, Korean, Khmer, Chinese, Thai, and Lao speakers report speaking English less than “very well.” For a public agency running a community meeting, a construction notice, or an environmental health campaign, that means a sizable share of the audience will only ever understand a message if it’s delivered in their language, at the right reading level, through a channel they already trust.
Skip any one of those three conditions, and the message — translated or not — doesn’t land.
What This Looks Like in Practice
We’ve seen this play out directly in our own work across Los Angeles:
LAUSD Redistricting Commission
When the second-largest school district in the country needed residents to understand a confusing, high-stakes redistricting process, translation alone wouldn’t have been enough. Lee Andrews Group built a strategy around bilingual media training for Commission officials, story placement designed for ethnic media outlets like Korea Daily and Nguoi Viet Daily News, and community surrogates who could carry the message themselves. The result was earned coverage across major outlets and broadcast features — and, more importantly, broader public understanding of a process that’s historically difficult to explain in any language.
South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD)
For AQMD’s “Why Healthy Air Matters” program, the goal wasn’t translation — it was getting students in disadvantaged, environmentally impacted communities across four counties to actually understand and act on air quality information. By building age-appropriate materials, working directly through schools and community-based organizations, and tailoring content to each community’s specific exposure and barriers, the program reached 900+ classrooms and achieved 76% student awareness of AQMD’s role — exceeding the agency’s participation goals every year.
Neither of these results came from a translation vendor. They came from treating language as one part of a broader cultural and relational strategy.
Five Questions to Ask Before Your Next Multilingual Campaign
1. Who is the messenger?
Communities often trust a known community-based organization, school, or local leader more than the agency itself. Translation can’t substitute for that relationship.
2. What’s the right reading level?
A technical or bureaucratic tone reads as “not for me” in any language. Plain-language drafting matters as much in Spanish or Tagalog as it does in English.
3. Does the message account for dialect and regional variation?
Spanish, Chinese, and Armenian are not monoliths — and neither are the communities that speak them.
4. Where will people actually see this?
A translated notice posted only on a city website won’t reach someone who gets their information from a church bulletin, a neighborhood council, or a local market.
5. Has anyone from the community reviewed it before it goes out?
A native-speaking reviewer with ties to the audience will catch what a translation service won’t.
The Bottom Line
In a region where nearly a quarter of residents speak English less than fluently, multilingual outreach isn’t a nice-to-have add-on to a communications plan — it’s the plan. But translation alone won’t close the gap between informing a community and earning its trust.
That takes knowing the neighborhoods, the messengers, and the nuance — not just the vocabulary.
Lee Andrews Group is a public relations and strategic communications firm that has spent more than 30 years building multilingual, multicultural outreach strategies for public agencies, developers, and nonprofits across Los Angeles — from transit and housing to environmental health and education. If your next project needs to reach every community it affects, not just the ones that speak English fluently, schedule a discovery call.