This webinar was created by three bilingual teachers who started our own translation company: Margaret Hanson, her husband Marco and twin sister Mary Lamb. Are you that default bilingual person on campus who gets asked to manage all language access needs, translating and interpreting for newsletters, special education meetings, parent-teacher conferences, attendance issues, back-to-school night, etc.? This is a survival crash course on how and when to use current tools like machine translation and interpretation by smartphone app, and when these communication needs should be outsourced to a human being with the right skills and training. We come from a Spanish-speaking background in Texas public and private schools, but are joined by international teachers and speakers of Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese and other languages on this recorded Zoom call, to get a broader perspective on the challenges of connecting a dominant-language educational system with a multilingual community of students and their families. Some of the topics we discuss are translation vs. interpretation, machine translation with free software like Google Translate and DeepL, MTPE (machine translation post-editing), language access and language politics, LEP (limited English proficient) students and their equivalents in countries where English is not the dominant language, and helping your adminstrators understand best practices for meeting the needs of linguistic minorities and first-generation immigrants.
