When residents who read Chinese or Vietnamese can't follow a council or board meeting, they miss decisions about their own streets, businesses and services. This guide walks through practical Chinese translation for public meetings and Vietnamese translation of live proceedings, from picking the right options to telling residents they exist.
Start with who lives in your community
Before choosing languages, look at the data. SB 707, the Brown Act modernization bill signed October 3, 2025, ties agenda translation for eligible legislative bodies to American Community Survey data on residents who speak English less than "very well," up to three languages. That same data is a sensible starting point for deciding which caption languages to offer during the meeting itself.
Questions to work through with your team:
- Do Chinese or Vietnamese appear in the American Community Survey data for your city or county?
- Have residents, community groups or front-counter staff asked for either language?
- Do you already translate notices, flyers or bills into these languages?
- Are there neighborhoods or business districts where these languages are common?
SB 707 does not itself require live captions. Translated captions are a practical way to support the bill's language-access and participation goals. Check with your city attorney or county counsel about which requirements apply to your body and when.
Chinese translation for public meetings: choosing your options
Simplified or Traditional Chinese
Written Chinese uses two character sets, and SentraCaptions supports both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Because captions are text, the question is which script your residents read, not which spoken variety they use. If you're not sure, ask local community organizations, libraries or schools what their printed materials use. Offering both is reasonable; each counts as one of the up to eight languages you can run in a meeting.
Vietnamese
Vietnamese is supported for translated captions, the phone page and transcripts. Vietnamese writing relies on diacritics (tone marks) that change the meaning of words, so it's worth having a fluent reader confirm the captions display cleanly on your chamber screen and on a few common phones before your first live meeting.
How Vietnamese and Chinese captions work during a meeting
- Your encoder (Pearl, OBS, vMix or others) sends the meeting to SentraCaptions as one more destination over RTMP or SRT. No new hardware.
- Speech is recognized in English, and captions appear about one second after speech. The sentence in progress updates live. Spanish speakers at public comment are recognized too.
- The captions are translated into each language you selected for that meeting.
- In the room, the chamber screen can show one or more languages side by side, with the meeting title, a clock and a QR code.
- Residents scan the QR code and read along on their phone in Chinese, Vietnamese or another language, at their own text size. No app and no sign-in.
If you stream on YouTube Live, YouTube shows one caption language per stream, so you'll pick one language for YouTube. The Chinese and Vietnamese translations are on the chamber screen and phone page.
Getting translation quality right
Machine translation quality varies by language. A few habits make a real difference:
- Ask a fluent reviewer. A staff member or community partner who reads Chinese or Vietnamese can watch a test meeting or read a transcript and flag terms that come out wrong.
- Build your glossary. Add council member names, streets, neighborhoods and program names so the English captions spell them right. Correct English is the starting point for every translated language.
- Improve the audio. Clear microphone audio helps recognition. Ask speakers to stay close to the mic.
- Set expectations. Every screen labels the captions as automatic and notes they may contain errors. Say the same in your announcements.
For a deaf or hard-of-hearing resident who requests CART (a human stenographer captioning live) as an accommodation, consider that request on its own merits; automatic captions are not a substitute in every situation.
Telling residents, and what happens after the meeting
Translated captions only help if people know about them. SB 707 also asks eligible bodies to make reasonable efforts to reach communities that don't traditionally participate. Practical steps:
- Post a short notice in Chinese and Vietnamese on your public meetings webpage explaining how to scan the QR code and read along.
- If your body translates agendas, add a line about the phone page next to the instructions for joining by phone or internet.
- Share the notice with community organizations, faith groups and local media that serve these residents.
- Announce the option at the start of each meeting and keep the QR code visible on the chamber screen.
After the meeting, transcripts are available in every language as TXT or SRT (subtitle) files. You can post an SRT file with the meeting video, or share a Vietnamese or Chinese transcript with residents who ask. Transcripts are not official minutes, but they can help staff prepare them.