Unemployment Insurance Translation Assistant
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New Jersey

Unemployment Insurance Translation Assistant

Spanish speakers account for 95% of language access requests in New Jersey's unemployment insurance cases, and a January 2024 state law requires improved language access in both interpretation and written documents. Off-the-shelf translation tools render unemployment terminology too literally to be reliable, and government has historically been cautious about publishing translated documents it cannot stand behind — leaving residents with limited access to clear, accurate information about benefits, rights, and responsibilities.

Year added2025
Status as of Spring 2026Deployed
Primary AgencyCentral IT / CIO Office
Approach and SolutionThe New Jersey Department of Labor, working with the state Office of Innovation, U.S. Digital Response, and Google.org fellows, built an AI-powered translation assistant for staff to use on unemployment insurance content. The team spent more than a year developing a new Spanish-language glossary of unemployment terms, drawing on the working knowledge of the state's bilingual call center agents and translating it into plain-language English over an additional eight months, then testing it against general-purpose tools like Google Translate and ChatGPT to confirm accuracy. The resulting human-vetted training data powers the assistant, which was deployed to staff in April 2024 and works with any off-the-shelf large language model.
Who it ServesBoth (Staff and The Public)
Area of ImpactWorkforce & Labor
AI Technology TypeSpeech & Translation
Impact / OutcomesNew Jersey officials report the assistant has tripled translation speed for call center employees, with quality on par with human translators.

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