Creating a multilingual local news service for the foreign population in the Turku region
In a world where information is at our fingertips, imagine being unable to access basic local news simply because it is unavailable in any language you understand – even English. This has been the reality for many non-native speakers in Southwest Finland, such as immigrants, refugees, and international students.
11,8% of the population in Turku were foreign-language speakers in 2019, which was roughly 23 000 people. The size of this foreign-language-speaking population has been growing by 2000 people every year. Additionally, there are over 4000 exchange students in Turku every year.
Many of the foreign-speaking people do not understand Finnish well enough to be able to read the local news, which is only available in Finnish or Swedish. As most news consumption has moved online, there is a way to access Finnish news using Google Translate, but it is hardly convenient for the consumer. In addition, local news in the Turku region has been scattered between various publishers, and you would have to know where to look for it. These extra steps make it too difficult for disadvantaged groups to access local news.
A study on the connection between digital and social exclusion by Ragnedda et al. (2022) discovered that socially disadvantaged groups in society find it more challenging to use digital tools, causing them to miss out on the benefits, leading to social exclusion and deeper inequalities. The researchers called this self-reinforcing digital and social exclusion phenomenon the inequality loop. Social exclusion is already a major problem among the foreign-speaking population in Finland. Yle reported in 2012 that 20% of foreign-speaking youth suffer from social exclusion, meaning that they are not studying or have a job. That is five times higher than among the native youth.
Solving the problem with technology and service design
A groundbreaking collaboration between a major Finnish newspaper company and marketing agency Nitro set out to solve the above-mentioned problem by utilizing emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Master’s degree student in Service Design Johannes Maliranta participated the project in a team that used the Lean Service Creation process to create and study the viability of a multilingual local news service called Locali Turku. The primary goal of the project was to build a multilingual news service that would automatically translate news articles into the user’s language. According to service design principles the customer point of view was crucial.
However, it became evident that the available translation technology and language proficiency in the project team was not sufficient to achieve acceptable translation quality, especially for most common languages spoken by the foreign-speaking population in the region, such as Russian, Arabic, and Kurdish. As a result, the scope of multilingualism was narrowed down to three languages: Finnish, Swedish, and English.
Despite successfully developing a service prototype that delivers local news in English and the very positive reception from the target audience during three surveys, an extensive usability study, and beta testing, the client ultimately decided not to proceed beyond the prototype phase. The decision was mainly due to concerns about brand risks associated with the questionable translation quality. Furthermore, the viability of the service posed a significant challenge. The additional costs of hiring a human moderator to ensure the quality of news articles in different languages would make it financially challenging to sustain the service by using traditional revenue generation models, such as advertising or subscriptions.
Would the service be feasible now?
The project shed light on the potential for future technological advancements to address the challenges the project team faced in 2019. The rapid development of artificial intelligence and translation technology presents an opportunity for improved machine translations, which could significantly reduce the risks associated with poorly translated news. As the quality of machine translations has been improving every year since the project was carried out, the possibility of viably sustaining a multilingual local news service could already be at hand.
The project revealed a pressing need for a multilingual local news service to serve the underprivileged foreign-speaking population in Southwest Finland. Foreign-language speakers who participated in the studies reported their struggles to stay informed about public local news. This situation leaves these individuals reliant on their personal networks, such as workplaces, schools, friends, and family, to stay updated on local matters. People without such networks are particularly disadvantaged.
References
Ragnedda, M., Ruiu, M. L. & Addeo, F. 2022. The self-reinforcing effect of digital and social exclusion: The inequality loop. ScienceDirect Telematics and Informatics Volume 72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2022.101852
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