Best Practices for Communicating with a Multilingual Workforce

A benefits conversation should take 15 minutes. When an employee speaks limited English, it can take an hour, and both people still leave unsure of what was decided. One HR director described the pattern on her frontline team simply: “There has been a disconnect in communication.” Her staff had made it work with bilingual coworkers and a lot of patience, but new hires were abandoning English-only paperwork, and, in her words, “we are actually losing applicants because they don’t understand us.”

If any part of your workforce is Limited English Proficient (LEP), meaning employees who speak English less than “very well,” this is already your problem too. Nearly 26 million people in the United States are LEP, and many of them work on the frontline: in warehouses, kitchens, guest services, production floors, and patient-facing roles. See how many LEP employees are in your state.

This guide lays out practical best practices for overcoming language barriers in the workplace: reaching every employee during onboarding, benefits, safety, and town halls; knowing when to interpret versus translate; and the measurable outcomes to expect when you get it right. Boostlingo works with employers on exactly this, and we’ll use real-world customer stories to show what “good” looks like.

Why language barriers in the workplace are a business problem

When a frontline employee doesn’t understand what you want to communicate, the cost isn’t abstract. It results in a safety incident, a missed benefits deadline, a corrective conversation that has to be repeated in writing, or a good hire who walks away during onboarding.

Safety is the clearest example. OSHA has been explicit since 2010 that employers must present training “in a manner that workers can understand,” and that a worker who cannot follow a safety briefing is a worker at risk. Federal data bear this out: foreign-born workers, who make up a large share of the LEP labor force, are concentrated in higher-hazard industries like construction, production, material handling, and hospitality services. A safety training that only half the room understands isn’t just a compliance gap. It’s a liability, and the costs compound beyond safety.

Benefits go unused when enrollment materials aren’t understood. Performance feedback doesn’t change behavior when the employee can’t follow it. As one manager put it, “I want to be able to have a conversation where they’re doing something wrong and have them understand me. I don’t want to get to the point of a written conversation before I can even correct the action.” And retention suffers: employees who feel unable to ask for help or who never fully understand their own benefits inevitably leave.

The takeaway is straightforward: communicating with a multilingual workforce is how you keep people safe, compliant, enrolled, and on the job.

Start by mapping the moments that matter: spoken vs. written

The most useful first move is to inventory where communication happens with your workforce, then sort each moment into one of two buckets. Getting this split right is what turns a vague “we should translate more” into a plan.

• Spoken, live moments need interpretation: a person (or increasingly, AI) conveying meaning in real time. Think onboarding conversations, HR and benefits discussions, performance feedback, town halls, orientations, standups, and safety briefings.
• Written materials need translation: converting a document into another language. Think employee handbooks, benefits guides, safety manuals, policies, and new-hire forms.

Two terms worth getting straight, because they’re often used interchangeably and shouldn’t be: interpretation is spoken and happens in the moment; translation is written and produced ahead of time. You’ll almost always need both.

Map your own moments this way, and the solution stops being one big project. It becomes a set of specific, solvable needs.

Best practices for spoken conversations: on-demand interpreting and meeting interpretation

Live moments are where the “grab a bilingual coworker” habit takes over, which can quietly cause damage. A colleague pulled onto the floor to interpret is a colleague not doing their own job; as one site leader described the old way, “previously, using an employee as an interpreter took away from production.”

Worse, in a sensitive conversation (a disciplinary meeting, a workers’ comp claim, a termination), a coworker, friend, or family member is exactly the wrong person in the room. One HR leader described the bind of asking bilingual staff to interpret hard news: “They don’t want to tell them that they’re being fired… They’re friends. They’re family, some of them.”

Professional interpretation removes that single point of failure. Two modes cover most workforce needs.

One-to-one HR and onboarding conversations

For unscheduled, private conversations, on-demand interpreting connects a neutral professional interpreter in seconds, over Video Remote Interpreting (VRI) or Over-the-Phone Interpreting (OPI). No pre-booking, no pulling a coworker off the line. A manager can start a benefits or performance conversation and have a qualified, confidential interpreter on the call immediately. The same site leader who used to lose production time to ad-hoc interpreting put the change plainly: “I now have an opportunity to immediately support an employee through Boostlingo without delay.”

Nowadays, on-demand doesn’t mean a human on every call. AI interpreting can handle a growing share of those moments where the goal is immediate support, not a complex conversation.

A practical rule of thumb for choosing between AI and human interpreting: AI when it fits, human when it counts. For routine, low-stakes exchanges (a quick shift question, a scheduling clarification), AI interpreting is fast and cost-effective. For sensitive or legally significant conversations, a human interpreter belongs at the center. Boostlingo supports both, and a hybrid of the two, so you’re not forced to pick one model for every situation.

Town halls, orientations, and all-hands

Group moments are the other half of spoken communication. AI live translation lets everyone in a town hall or orientation follow along in their own language at once, and professional Remote Simultaneous Interpretation (RSI), human interpreters delivering meaning in real time, is available when accuracy and nuance matter most. The access model matters as much as the technology: frontline workers rarely have a company laptop or a corporate email login, so the practical best practice is to let them join by scanning a QR code from a personal phone. No app download, no account, no company device necessary.

Great Wolf Lodge, the family indoor waterpark brand, is one Boostlingo customer that can show how this plays out. Across 23 properties, its 12,000-plus “Pack Members” speak more than 20 languages, and coordinating external interpreters for every town hall was, in one leader’s words, difficult and expensive to scale: “a lot of variables within that, from a cost perspective to a timing perspective.”

Using AI live translation for meetings and on-demand interpreting for one-to-one conversations on a single platform, the company brought town halls, orientations, standups, and HR conversations into one shared environment. Julian Johnson, Corporate Manager of Human Resources, described the payoff: “We are seeing turnover rates decrease, while accessibility numbers from our inclusion and belonging survey increase,” alongside some of the highest engagement scores the company had recorded.

Best practices for written communication: translating the documents employees rely on

Not everything is a conversation. The handbook, the safety manual, the benefits guide, the code of conduct, the onboarding forms: these are the documents that define the employment relationship, and an employee who can’t read them is operating on guesswork.

What to translate first

Best practice here is to prioritize by risk, not volume. Translate the highest-stakes materials first: safety procedures, benefits and enrollment guides, policies with legal weight, and anything an employee must acknowledge or sign. A short, well-translated set of core documents does more than a large pile of nice-to-haves.

Keeping translations accurate and secure

Two cautions from the field. First, keep versions in sync: when the English handbook changes, the translated versions have to change with it, or you’ve created a new liability. Second, be deliberate about tools. Consumer machine translation is tempting for a quick job, but for anything binding or confidential, it’s the wrong choice; as one program lead flatly put it, “We can’t use Google Translate. It has to be secure.” Use professional translation for materials that carry legal, safety, or privacy weight, and ask any vendor how employee data is handled and retained before you send it.

The risk of leaning on consumer tools showed up starkly in a UK coroner’s inquest into the death of 13-year-old Hannah Jacobs, who suffered a fatal allergic reaction after drinking a hot chocolate at a Costa Coffee branch that was supposed to be made dairy-free. The inquest heard that Costa’s allergy-safety training was only offered in English, and that some staff, including a barista who said she uses Google Translate “when reading English,” had run the training through the app to get through it. That’s the interpretation-versus-translation gap in miniature: an employee can be fluent enough to take an order and talk with a customer all day, and still not fluent enough to read and retain a dense, written safety module. A translation app can bridge the gap with a word here and there. It’s not a substitute for training or documentation that a worker can actually read and understand.

Done well, translation pays off in ways you can measure. Fullscript, a nationwide distributor, translated its benefits and culture-survey materials into languages including Spanish, French, Lao, and Italian, and paired document translation with on-demand interpreting. Open-enrollment participation rose from 58.22% in 2023 to 71.86% in 2024. Greeny St. Jean, People Business Partner on the team, described it, “Everyone loved having the culture survey and benefits materials translated,” and participation followed.

What good looks like: two multilingual workforces in practice

The pattern across both examples is the same: match the method to the moment, on one platform, and measure the outcome.

Watch the success stories:

Great Wolf Lodge

Julian Johnson, Corporate Manager, HR, shares how Great Wolf Lodge implemented Boostlingo across their 23 properties.

Fullscript Manufacturing

Fullscript HR and site leaders share the value that multilingual workforce communication with Boostlingo brought to their organization.

Neither organization solved its multilingual communication needs with a single tool or a one-time project. They inventoried where their most acute communication gaps were, interpreted the live ones, translated the written ones, and made access frictionless for a frontline workforce.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you communicate with employees who don’t speak English fluently?

Split the moments into two buckets. Live, spoken conversations get a professional interpreter, in person, by phone, on video, or through AI, and written materials like handbooks and benefits guides get translated ahead of time. Add a way for frontline workers to join meetings from a personal phone, and route sensitive conversations to a human interpreter.

What’s the difference between interpretation and translation?

Interpretation is spoken and happens in real time. Translation is written and produced in advance. Read our full breakdown of interpretation vs. translation.

Should you translate your employee handbook?

Yes, if any part of your workforce is Limited English Proficient. The handbook, safety manual, and benefits guide carry legal and safety weight, so they belong on your short list for professional translation rather than consumer machine translation.

Is it safe to use interpretation and translation for HR conversations?

Yes, when you use a professional, confidential interpreter instead of a bilingual coworker. On-demand interpreting keeps sensitive HR conversations, like disciplinary meetings or workers’ comp discussions, accurate and private, and keeps friends or family members out of the room.

What is a frontline or deskless worker?

A frontline or deskless worker is someone whose job doesn’t come with a company laptop, a corporate email address, or regular desk time, think warehouse, kitchen, guest services, or production-floor roles. Reaching them means designing communication that doesn’t assume a company device or account, like QR-code meeting access.

Reaching every employee is a solvable problem

Communicating with a multilingual workforce means matching the right method to each moment: interpreting conversations, translating documents that matter, and making access effortless for people who don’t sit at a desk. Do that, and the results follow, from safer floors to higher enrollment to lower turnover.

See how Boostlingo brings workforce communication tools for events like town halls and orientations, on-demand interpreting for one-to-one HR conversations, and document translation for the handbooks and benefits guides your team relies on onto one platform.

Ready to see it firsthand? Request a demo.