Among the myriad challenges facing the nation’s school districts is the mounting costs of their multilingual communications. Yet with over 20% of the U.S. population speaking a language other than English, ensuring that your school’s information be made available in a language your students and parents understand is critical. The high amount of information, forms and permissions that schools distribute often present a challenge to these non-native English speakers. And unfamiliarity with the American K-12 system can equally impact the ability of LEP/ELL parents to fully participate in their child’s education.
So how can schools ensure effective communications that truly reach their growing LEP populations? What can be done to keep translation quality high while staying within budget? As part of our free webinar series at K12Translate, we are offering an installment that directly addresses these issues. Titled “Avoiding Eight Translation Traps: Planning Multilingual Communication for Your District,” the webinar will take place 11:30 a.m. (PT) on April 6th and will explore a range of strategies for responding to today’s changing K12 environment.
We hope you can join us for this webinar!
Click here to register
Keep Learning!
Leslie
K12Translate
K12Translate.com Home
Get in touch
1-800-737-8481
info@k12translate.com
Archive for February, 2010
Develop Strategies for Avoiding Translation Traps
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Russian Language Overview – Part II
Thursday, February 18th, 2010
Today Russian is primarily spoken in Russia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once part of the USSR, where it was widely taught in school. However, younger generations may not be fluent in it, because Russian is no longer mandatory in the school system. It was also widely taught in Asian countries such as Laos, Vietnam, and Mongolia due to the Soviet influence, and is still used as a lingua franca in Afghanistan by various tribes.
Sizeable Russian-speaking communities also exist in the U.S. (especially in large urban centers such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, and Chicago.) According to the United States 2000 Census, Russian was reported as the language spoken at home by 1.50% of population, or about 4.2 million, placing it at #10 of languages spoken in the United States.
When translating into Russian it is important to know your target audience and where they are located to reach them effectively. For example, when deciding how to communicate with immigrants from the former USSR, Russian should be your first choice because Russian was the official language. However, for many immigrants, Russian is not their native tongue, but rather their second language. This includes Ukrainians, the largest non-Russian ethnic group of the former USSR. Even though both languages are written in the Cyrillic alphabet and are similar, they are not mutually understandable. Belarusian is between the two and is often understood by both Russians and Ukrainians.
Keep Learning!
Maggie
K12Translate
Russian Language Overview – Part I
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
Today I want to write about a language that is very close to my own heart considering I spent my entire undergraduate career studying it. This beautiful, complex language is Russian and has led to my personal love affair of the literature and culture. Russian is the most widely spoken language in Europe and the most widespread of the Slavic languages. It is the first language to about 145 million people worldwide and the second language to an additional 110 million.
Russian is the official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan as well as one of the official languages of the United Nations. It belongs to the family of Indo-European languages, and is therefore related to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, as well as the modern Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages including English, French, and Irish, respectively.
Russian is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet, consisting of 33 letters. Setting up Russian documents as Word files and as content on websites requires some preparation and knowledge of Cyrillic typesetting issues. Using standard Windows-based Unicode fonts and choosing Cyrillic encoding does the trick for Russian text in most cases. There are certain Unicode fonts for Windows that contain correctly addressed Russian characters, e.g. Arial, Courier, Tahoma, Times and Times New Roman. Please keep in mind that Cyrillic will not display correctly if Unicode fonts are not used. If you ever have any questions about the written language you should always feel free to ask your Language Service Provider who can guide you through the unique Cyrillic typesetting issues.
Keep Learning!
Maggie
K12Translate
Lao, Tigrinya, Burmese Fonts – Oh My!
Thursday, February 4th, 2010
Having worked in the field of education translation for the past decade, I have witnessed the rise of multilingual technology in leaps and bounds. Gone are the days when bilingual parents would handwrite informative memos and translate parent newsletters for ESL communities. Instead, school districts work hand-in-hand with professional native speaking translators who specialize in cross-cultural communication, English Language Learning (ELL) education and cutting edge technology.
One component of this technology is working with foreign language fonts. At the most basic level, fonts are stylized typefaces of an alphabet, character set or script. In order to print a document correctly, the fonts used within the document need to be installed on your computer. Most computers already come equipped with “system fonts” which are commonly used fonts including those of the more popular languages like Chinese or German.
However, historically, many languages of limited diffusion such as Armenian, Khmer/Cambodian or Urdu have not been as widely accommodated in the world of multilingual fonts. You may require very unique fonts that need to be purchased when working with these languages in conjunction with certain programs or even require a language specific operating system. In order to avert any surprises at the end of an education translation project, I highly recommend proactively discussing any font requirements that you may have with your Language Service Provider (LSP). Your LSP should also be able to advise you on the best fonts to be used for a project and also provide you with a printable Portable Document Format (PDF) that has embedded fonts within the document.
Keep Learning!
Maggie
