The fastest way to fail a Spanish-speaking member is to write a notice in English, run it through machine translation, and call it bilingual. The words may be technically correct and still be useless — because the reading level is wrong, the cultural framing is off, and the call to action is buried.
Translate the meaning, not the sentence
Good bilingual outreach is built, not converted. It starts from the member's question — '¿Qué tengo que hacer y para cuándo?' — and answers it in the first two lines. It uses the register people actually speak, avoids false cognates that change meaning, and keeps the one required action visually unmissable.
It also respects that 'Spanish' is not one audience. A notice for a Caribbean community and one for a Mexican-American community can use different phrasing for the same idea. Native-quality work accounts for that; a translation memory does not.
Why it matters now
Language barriers are one of the named drivers of procedural coverage loss. For many plans and agencies, the Spanish-speaking population is exactly the group most at risk of falling off coverage by mistake — and therefore exactly where multilingual quality produces the largest retention gain.