Every year school districts across the country spend millions of dollars on education translation services. Obviously, considering the state of the economy and tight education translation budgets we are all looking for ways to cut costs. I have found that one very effective way to reduce written translation costs is to reuse previously translated documents.

There are several ways to reuse education translations but one that stands out is ‘genericizing’ materials so that they can be used repeatedly over several years. To explain, when you create documents for translation into multiple languages, by removing personalized information and replacing it with generic form fields, you are able to simply plug in personalized information such as dates, schools and personal names as appropriate. This ‘genericized’ style of writing minimizes or even removes the need to retranslate the content every year when the personalized information inevitably changes.

For instance, in a parent letter, instead of writing:
—————————–
Dear Mrs. Lopez,

I am writing to let you know that on September 1st, Jose will begin Academically Gifted classes.
—————————–

You could phrase the sentence:
—————————–
Dear Parent,

I am writing to let you know that on DD/MM/YYYY, your child will begin classes through the XXXX Program.
—————————–

In this way, the template of the letter can be translated into many languages and all of the personalized information can simply be plugged into the slots by school district staff. After the initial translation, this letter can be reused over and over again thereby saving your school district translation money!

Keep Learning!
Maggie
K12Translate

When Bob Dylan wrote, “The times they are a-changing” in 1964 there were 51.7 million people in the United States enrolled in all forms of educational institutions such as K12 schools, colleges, universities and trade schools.

The American Community Survey showed that by 2006 there were 53 million children ages 5-17 years enrolled in K12 schools alone! Of that 53 million, 11 million children spoke a language other than English at home, while another 3 million spoke English less than “very well.”

Obviously, Bob Dylan was on the right track when he sang that times are a-changing, but who would have thought our population would evolve so dramatically that by 2006, 20 percent of our K12 students would speak a mother tongue other than English?

To reach this next generation, it is our responsibility to ensure the every English Language Learning (ELL) student and parent has language access through language translation services and interpretation. To this end, we are very excited to introduce our new online education translation services, K12Translate. Like you, we know that providing clear and accurate language translations services to non-native English speakers is an essential tool in high-quality education

We sincerely look forward to providing our online education translation services to you and your community.

Keep Learning!
Maggie
K12Translate