language discussions

I just attended a women-only meeting as a follow up for an incredibly good workshop I went to about a month ago.

Two of our participants are non-native german speakers, one of them is struggling quite a bit with understanding what we're discussing. The meeting was mainly about the outcome of the workshop, a feedback for the trainers as well as for us. One of the non-native-german speaker mentioned that she found it difficult to interrupt us every 10 minutes or so to ask for clarification. I then suggested that we should switch to english-only, so that this african women - being in a minority position here - wouldn't have to insist on a translation. This suggestion wasn't considered for too long, because it wouldn't solve our language problems, as not all of the participants were very fluent in English. For the next meeting we agreed on a translator for that woman, but that solution doesn't feel right to me, for some reason. I think that this will not ensure that everyone will be able to participate equally in the conversation. On the other hand I haven't got a good solution either. Any suggestions? Comments?