Response - Language Preference

[Karen Farnham]

Hello - 

Are all responses returned in originating language?  Is there a way to specify language to return results sets in?

Thanks.

Karen

[Brady Fausett]

Hello Karen,

This is Brady from the Blue Button API Team.  The data is returned from the originating language, which as far as I know, is English.  There is not a way to specify the language that the data is returned in.  Out of curiosity, what use case do you have that may require responses to be returned in a different language.

Thank you!

Brady Fausett

[Karen Farnham]

Hello - 

I apologize for the delay in responding; our implementation was delayed to the fall.  I work for Blue Cross and Blue SHield of Florida; the use case is associated to sales of Medicare plans to the Hispanic population.  All of our sales pages are available in Spanish,.   Our Spanish page will exit to the CMS page which will be in English, and all associated data will be returned in English?  The data will then be utilized to suggest / recommend) a good/better/best plan for Medicare members to consider.

Thanks!

Karen

[Rachel Lorencz]

Hi Karen, 

Thanks for the info - to clarify, when you say 'our Spanish page will exit to the CMS page' - which page are you talking about? Is this the authentication (medicare login) and the permissions screen? I wasn't sure if you mean the UI that the Medicare enrollee sees, or if you were talking about the FHIR responses returned via the API. 

If you are talking about the login screen, I see there is an option to translate  this page to to Spanish when visiting https://www.medicare.gov/account/login/ (see top right for the option to change language to Spanish). However, I do notice that if the screen is smaller (which I believe is the case for our authentication flow for BB2), the button to translate to Spanish is missing. I can reach out to the Medicare.gov team and see if that can be added back in for the responsive experience as well. 

For the next page after the login screen (the permissions screen), there are currently no translation options. This is something we could add in the future and would invite feedback if this is desired. Additionally, it would be helpful for us to know what percentage of your Medicare customers are Spanish speakers. If you are not comfortable posting that publicly here, feel free to email us directly at bluebu...@cms.hhs.gov

Thank you!

Rachel