Multilingual canvassing

The best volunteer isn't always the best English speaker.

Activate's interface ships in nine languages — English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic, with right-to-left layout for Arabic. Each person on your team picks theirs on their own phone, and everyone's work lands in the same campaign.

How it works

  1. 1Each volunteer picks a language on their own phone — and on first open, the app follows the phone's own language setting.
  2. 2Every screen they touch switches with it: joining the campaign, opening an assignment, swiping a response, adding a note.
  3. 3Choose Arabic and the whole layout mirrors, not just the words — the page reads right-to-left the way the language does.

What your campaign gets

  • Nine interface languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic.
  • Full right-to-left layout for Arabic, so the interface runs the same direction the reader does.
  • One campaign, several languages at once. A volunteer's choice changes their screen only — not your data, and not anyone else's view.
  • Nothing to switch on and nothing to buy — the languages are part of free core canvassing.

In a field program

In a precinct where several languages are spoken at home, a campaign could recruit volunteers from those blocks and let each one open the app in the language they read fastest — one working in Spanish, another in English, another in Arabic — with every door they log landing on the same campaign dashboard.

Limits — and what stays yours

  • Activate translates the app, not your campaign. Your script, your talking points, and the voter records you import stay exactly in the language you wrote and imported them — we don't translate those, and we don't claim to.
  • Nine languages ship today. If a volunteer's language isn't one of them, there's no half-finished version waiting — they work in the closest of the nine.
  • What gets said at the door is still a human skill. The app can tell a canvasser which door and record what happened; the conversation belongs to your volunteer.

See it in your own language.

Create a campaign, switch the language in the menu, and walk one route with a friend — free core canvassing, no credit card.

Last reviewed: 2026-08-01