ABOUT
What this site does.
Translate Politics is the place to follow what actually happens in Congress: every debate, statement by statement, in plain language beside the official record.
How it works
- The Congressional Record is downloaded from Congress.
- Short procedural exchanges are skipped.
- A language model says each substantive statement again in plain words, adding nothing, with the same instructions for every speaker and party.
- The plain-language version is published beside the official wording and a link to the record.
- Each debate gets a short summary, each Member a profile, and statements are graded on how clearly they answer, reason and inform.
See also: The Translation Process.
How current is it?
The Congressional Record normally appears on the business day after Congress sits. The site checks for new issues every hour and imports each one as soon as it appears.
Right now it is current through issue 155 (2026-09-30), and the record was last checked 14 minutes ago.
To be told rather than come and look, there are RSS feeds: every debate as its summary is written (twenty to forty entries on a issue day), one entry per issue listing its debates and their summaries, and one for each Member, linked from their page. A issue reaches the feeds a few hours after it is imported, once its debates are translated and summarized.
Who made this site?
See also: Why this site exists.
Jake Donkersgoed on X
contact@translatepolitics.com
Icons from Lucide (ISC) and Tabler Icons (MIT); licences.