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NYC Office of Technology and Innovation

NYC - DTPR AI Register

AI-Powered Website Translation for Limited English Speakers

What it is for

Translation & Language Access
  • Translates the Comptroller's website, its subpages, and printed materials into the 10 languages required under Local Law 30 of 2017 and over 100 additional languages, making public financial and civic information accessible to New Yorkers with limited English proficiency.

NYC AI Use Cases Register — Google Translate (Office of the Comptroller, 2025)

Run by
Office of the Comptroller
Where
No fixed location
Kept
Not stated by the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation.
Shared with
Not stated by the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation.

What it is for

Translation & Language Access

Google Translate is used by the NYC Office of the Comptroller to automatically translate its website, subpages, and printed materials into over 100 languages, supporting New Yorkers with limited English proficiency. The system operates fully autonomously — when a visitor selects a language, content is translated without human review. Translation data is handled by Google as vendor, and training data for the underlying model is proprietary to Google.

What it collects and what happens to it

Data taken in

About behaviour
Identifiable data
  • Web content on the Comptroller's website and its subpages, as well as content for printed materials, written in English. Users' language selection and page interaction may be passed to the Google Translate API as part of the translation request.

NYC AI Use Cases Register — Google Translate (Office of the Comptroller, 2025)

Processing

Language Models
  • Google Translate uses Google's proprietary neural machine translation models to convert English text into more than 100 target languages. Training data is proprietary to Google and not disclosed to the deploying agency.

NYC AI Use Cases Register — Google Translate (Office of the Comptroller, 2025)

What it does

Creating (Generative AI)
Autonomous
  • Google Translate automatically produces translated versions of English web content and printed materials into a selected target language. No human reviews or edits the translation before it is presented to the user. The system operates fully autonomously and runs on a daily basis.

NYC AI Use Cases Register — Google Translate (Office of the Comptroller, 2025)

Outputs

Generated content
Anonymized data
  • Translated content in the user's selected language — the Comptroller website pages, subpages, and printed materials rendered in the target language. Translations are generated on demand and presented directly to the user without human review.

NYC AI Use Cases Register — Google Translate (Office of the Comptroller, 2025)

Run by

Office of the Comptroller
  • The NYC Office of the Comptroller's Communications Department deploys and operates the Google Translate widget on the Comptroller's website to meet language access obligations under Local Law 30 of 2017.

NYC AI Use Cases Register — Google Translate (Office of the Comptroller, 2025)

Built by

Google
  • Google provides Google Translate as a publicly available off-the-shelf product. The underlying translation model and its training data are proprietary to Google. The vendor updated the tool during the reporting period and the agency continued use under the updated version.

NYC AI Use Cases Register — Google Translate (Office of the Comptroller, 2025)

Kept for

Not stated by the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation.

Shared with

Not stated by the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation.

Stored

Not stated by the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation.

How to read the colours

Can it identify you?

Anonymized data
Data about people with the link to who is broken. Stripped of identifiers, blurred, aggregated, or noised so this system can’t reasonably tie a record back to an individual.
Pseudonymous data
Each person’s data is tied to a token (hash, ID, template) that lets this system recognise the same person across events, but the token itself doesn’t reveal a name. Reidentification is possible with extra information.
Identifiable data
The data either contains a direct identifier (name, address, account name, recognisable face or voice, plate number) or carries a token this system uses to look up legal identity during processing.

Who completes the loop?

Human decides
This mode suggests; a person decides what to do next. The AI is always advisory — a human is in the loop on every decision. Example: a triage tool ranks cases for a clinician who chooses which to see first.
Human executes
This mode decides; a person carries out the result. Example: an optimizer plans the day’s trash-collection routes, and drivers run them.
Autonomous
This mode decides and acts on its own. No person reviews each decision or carries out the resulting action.

Definitions from the DTPR standard. Amber is about your data, violet about who decides. The fuller the shape and the deeper the colour, the more identifying the data or the less a person is involved.

What you can do

Ask about this system

Questions go to the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation, not the vendor.

Your rights

  • Right to Algorithmic TransparencyMembers of the public can learn that the Comptroller's website uses Google Translate, an automated machine translation tool provided by Google. The underlying model and training data are proprietary to Google and not disclosed by the agency. For questions about the agency's use of AI tools, contact the NYC Office of the Comptroller's Communications Department.

Risks and safeguards

  • Societal & cultural harmAutomated machine translation may produce inaccurate or misleading translations of official government information, potentially causing confusion or misunderstanding for users with limited English proficiency who rely on translated content for civic and financial decisions. The system does not include human post-editing or quality review of translations.Safeguard: The agency's use is scoped to general informational content (not legally binding determinations). The system covers the 10 languages required under Local Law 30 of 2017, providing broad reach. Users may be implicitly on notice that translation is automated (Google Translate branding), but no explicit accuracy disclaimer is described in the register entry.