When your target group has low English proficiency

Last updated: 26th November 2025

1. Translation challenges

While translation can be a useful tool for bringing people into EA, we generally advise being cautious when your translation will be widely shared or used for promotion. Benjamin Todd wrote some considerations about why not to rush to translate effective altruism into other languages that provides some more detail for the arguments against this. As always, you can reach out to groups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org if you're uncertain about translating materials or sharing translated materials in your local language. We can connect you to other groups going through the same process.

2. Common paths for non-English speaking countries

There’s often a tension between whether to do outreach and learning processes in English or in the local language. The reason is that, to really engage in effective altruism at the moment (including reading core materials, attending conferences) people do need to be proficient in English (though this is starting to change for Spanish and Portuguese). So in the short term for early to medium stage groups, it’s often more useful to focus on people who already have strong English skills, since they can participate more fully in the community, and eventually help with translation and accessibility work for those who don’t.

• Step 1: People who speak both the local language and English often start by doing the standard online CEA courses.
• Step 2: A common intermediate step is running programs where the readings remain in English, but the discussions happen in the local language. This works well for participants with strong reading ability in English but less confidence speaking, and helps them engage more deeply.
• Step 3: Out of those graduates (and others) a group of people develops who are highly knowledgeable about EA and strong in both English and the local language. They are then well-placed to lead translation projects.
• Step 4: Translation projects themselves usually take months. Groups use machine translation tools as a starting point, but the final materials are always reviewed and edited by native speakers who understand EA concepts and are familiar with the original texts. At that stage, groups tend to produce fully translated versions of the intro materials.

It’s also worth flagging that, even before the translation stage, most groups make small adjustments to the materials so they are more appropriate for the local audience. Much of the current intro content is designed for a Western audience, so some adaptation is useful.