Tomedes Helps Impact for Equity Make Cook County's Property Tax Appeal System Accessible to 14 Language Communities

Impact for Equity has spent more than 50 years fighting systemic injustice in Chicago. When language became a barrier to property rights, Tomedes made sure it did not stay one.

About Impact for Equity

Impact for Equity is a public interest law and policy center that has been a catalyst for racial, economic, and social justice in Chicago and Illinois since 1969. Originally founded as Businessmen for the Public Interest, the organization has grown into one of Chicago's most respected legal advocacy institutions – fighting housing inequity, challenging discriminatory policy, and holding institutions accountable for fair and equitable treatment.

Today, Impact for Equity's work is focused on two interconnected systems: affordable housing and the criminal legal system. The organization uses legal tools, policy research, litigation, and community partnerships to dismantle structural barriers that disproportionately affect communities of color and low-income families across Illinois.

When Impact for Equity identified language access as a barrier to Cook County residents exercising their right to appeal property tax assessments, they needed a translation partner who could move quickly, cover a wide range of languages, and deliver materials accurate enough to guide community members through a formal legal process.

Industry and Services

• Legal 

• NGO 

• Public Interest Advocacy 

• Certified AI Translation with Full Human Post-Editing 

• English to 14 Languages

The Challenge

Property tax appeals are not simple. The Cook County Property Tax Appeal System involves formal procedures, defined legal terminology, and structured documentation (checklists, flowcharts, explainers, and process guides) that require residents to understand their rights, gather evidence, and engage with a government process that was designed in English and has historically been most accessible to English-speaking homeowners.

For the many Chicago-area residents whose primary language is not English, this system presents a compounding barrier: not just the complexity of the process itself, but the absence of materials that explain it clearly in the language they use at home. Impact for Equity's work in housing equity made this gap impossible to ignore. The organization needed translated versions of nine Cook County Property Tax Appeal documents (covering general explainers, flowcharts, common types of appeals, burdens and limitations, and checklists for recently purchased property, condominiums, special circumstances, factual errors, and lack of uniformity) across 14 languages simultaneously.

Three challenges defined the project.

1. Legal terminology requiring precision across 14 language communities

Property tax appeal documents are legal documents. Terms covering assessment procedures, appeal grounds, burden of proof standards, and procedural requirements carry defined legal meaning – and in several of the target languages, the communities most likely to use these materials would include residents with varying levels of formal education and legal literacy. The translation had to be both legally accurate and genuinely accessible: precise enough to hold up in a procedural context, plain enough to be useful to a homeowner navigating the system for the first time.

2. Language diversity spanning four language families and two writing systems

The 14 target languages (Arabic, Chinese Simplified, French, Farsi, Hindi, Korean, Pashto, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese) span four language families, two RTL (right-to-left) writing systems, and communities with vastly different relationships to the legal vocabulary used in Cook County's appeal process. A single translation workflow could not be applied uniformly. Arabic and Urdu required RTL formatting awareness. Pashto required sourcing from a specialist pool with limited availability. Chinese Simplified, Korean, and Vietnamese required translators with familiarity with how legal process terminology is conventionally rendered for immigrant communities in the U.S. context, not just in-country equivalents.

3. Speed and simultaneity across all 14 languages

Impact for Equity needed all 14 language versions of all nine documents delivered on a timeline that would allow the materials to reach community members before the relevant appeal deadlines. This was not a sequential project – the 14 language versions needed to be produced in parallel, with quality assurance applied across each language independently, and delivered as a complete package rather than in staggered batches that would have created unequal access across language communities.

Why Tomedes?

Impact for Equity selected Tomedes for its ability to cover a wide range of languages (including less commonly requested languages such as Pashto) and its certified AI translation with full human post-editing workflow, which provided the combination of speed and accuracy the project required.

A dedicated account manager guided Impact for Equity through the process, answered questions at each stage, and ensured the team understood exactly what was being delivered and when. The project was structured to produce all 14 language versions in parallel, with human post-editing applied independently to each language before delivery.

The Solution

1. Certified AI translation with full human post-editing across all 14 languages

Rather than applying a single translation method uniformly, Tomedes used a certified AI translation with full human post-editing workflow – combining the speed and consistency of AI-assisted translation with the accuracy and contextual judgment of professional human linguists who reviewed and corrected every segment before delivery. For legal documents that would be used by community members making formal property tax appeals, this approach ensured that no terminology was left to AI output alone: every document was reviewed and approved by a qualified human linguist with subject-matter familiarity before it left Tomedes' hands.

2. Specialist sourcing for lower-resource language pairs

For languages including Pashto, Farsi, and Urdu (where the pool of qualified translators with both language fluency and U.S. legal context familiarity is narrower), Tomedes drew on its specialist linguist network to source translators with the right combination of language proficiency and relevant background. RTL formatting requirements for Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, and Pashto were flagged during the pre-production stage and addressed in the delivered files.

3. Parallel delivery across all nine documents and 14 languages

All nine documents were translated across all 14 languages simultaneously, ensuring that no language community received their materials later than another. The complete package (126 translated documents in total) was delivered to Impact for Equity's team as a single, organized delivery, ready for distribution to the community partners and residents who needed them.

The Result

When Impact for Equity's community partners and residents in Chicago's Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Polish, Vietnamese, Korean, Tagalog, Ukrainian, Russian, Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, Pashto, and French-speaking communities received the Cook County Property Tax Appeal materials, they received them in their own language – with the same procedural accuracy available to English-speaking homeowners. The documents were delivered on time, within budget, and without quality issues requiring rework.

Language should not determine whether a Chicago family can exercise their right to challenge an unfair property tax assessment. Tomedes' role in this project was to make sure it did not.

Are you a legal advocacy organization, nonprofit, or public institution that needs to make legal documents, community resources, or public information accessible across language communities? Contact Tomedes today for a free consultation.

"Tomedes translated 9 documents for us into three different languages. The cost was reasonable and the turnaround time was fast without sacrificing quality. Denis on the Customer Success Team was also extremely communicative and helpful, he really guided us through this process and answered our many questions."

Mallory Verez, Polikoff-Gautreaux Fellow, Impact for Equity

Key Details