Dev Diary: Building Indigenous Language Support: What We Learned

A behind-the-scenes look at how we build 3mpwrApp.

When we first discussed Indigenous language support, our instinct was to use machine translation. We quickly learned why that was wrong. Indigenous languages are living, culturally rich, and complex. Machine translation into them is often inaccurate, sometimes offensive, and always insufficient.

What we built instead was a framework for community-verified translations, with Indigenous language reviewers as genuine partners. The process was slower. The result was right.

The technical challenges were real — syllabic font rendering, right-to-left text handling, character encoding edge cases. Each one was worth solving, because the people who most need this app deserve to use it in their own language.

Technical Details

  • Indigenous communities face disproportionate workplace injury and disability rates
  • Colonial healthcare and legal systems create specific language-based barriers
  • Community-verified translations rather than machine translation throughout
  • Technical challenges: right-to-left text, special characters, syllabic font rendering
  • Language sovereignty is both a cultural right and a disability rights issue

In Practice

  • Working with Indigenous language communities directly to verify translations, not automating them
  • Adapting the UI for languages with different text directionality requirements
  • Ensuring letters and documents can reference specific Indigenous rights frameworks

What We Learned

  • Language is not just communication — it is identity, culture, and safety
  • Technology that excludes Indigenous languages participates in their erasure
  • Partnership rather than extraction: language support built with communities, not about them

Follow Our Development

We believe in building in public — the community we serve has been failed by opaque institutions too many times.