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Context

What the conversation already established

Most translation tools treat each sentence as the first sentence. The difference between a tool and a mediator is what it still knows on turn twelve.

Context

What the conversation already established

Most translation tools treat each sentence as the first sentence. The difference between a tool and a mediator is what it still knows on turn twelve.

Facts

Structured details about the conversation: who the person is, what the situation is, who else is in the room, how urgent it is. Set by the worker, declared by the person themselves, or picked up from what has been said.

Named entities

People, places, organisations, addresses, benefits, case references. The things a general translator quietly mangles, and the things a frontline conversation cannot afford to lose.

Who you are speaking to

Age band and gender are held as part of the conversation, set by the worker, declared by the person themselves, or picked up from what has been said. Many languages choose the word for a person from both at once, boy or man, young woman or elder, so without this a translation reaches for a term that is grammatically right and socially wrong.

Tone and register

Someone speaking carefully is not rendered as blunt. Someone frightened is not rendered as calm. Formality is carried in both directions, which matters in languages where the form of address is itself a statement.

Domain vocabulary

Housing, welfare, health, justice and safeguarding language, so "presenting as homeless" or "interim accommodation" arrives as the thing it means, not as four English words in a row.

Dialect and variety

A regional variety can be handled as itself, on either side of the conversation, instead of being flattened to the standard form.

The whole transcript

The exchange is kept as a reviewable record: every turn, every revision, every clarification, and what the score was at the time.