DOE's translation department working in overdrive

Posted by Philissa at 11:00 AM

An article in today's Times takes a look at the difficult job of providing translation services to schools and parents. Even with a stepped up translation unit that can now handle the city's eight most frequently spoken languages, the DOE can't meet all of the demand for translation services, especially if the many principals who "don't even know the unit exists" start to take advantage of it.

It sounds hard enough to spread 40 translators across all the work that must be done for the 42 percent of kids whose parents aren't native English speakers. On top of this, translators must invent new words in their languages to explain the DOE's frequently changing jargon, much of which is only barely intelligible in English.