This document discusses 8 common traps to avoid when planning multilingual communication for school districts. The traps include failure to recognize cultural norms, not accounting for literacy levels and readability, lack of translation oversight, not leveraging translation tools, poor quality control, not planning ahead to save time and money, and not sharing and recycling past translations. Effective strategies include developing close relationships with students and parents, writing simply, ensuring cultural appropriateness, using translation memory tools, involving native speakers in review, and budgeting for ongoing translation needs. Resources for further information are also provided.

1. Avoiding Eight Translation Traps:
Welco me
Planning Multilingual
Communication for Your District

2. Agenda
1. Introductions
2. Culture in the Classroom
3. Avoiding the Eight Traps
4. Tips, Tools and Resources
5. Q & A

3. Presenters
Lillian A. Tsai, President, TsaiComms
Lillian Tsai is founder and president of TsaiComms, LLC, a cross-
cultural consulting firm based in Portland, Oregon, that specializes in
bridging cultural gaps across differences.
Prakalpa Bastianpillai, VP Operations, viaLanguage
Client services management including K12 Business unit
14 years experience in Operations Management with Quality and
Continuous Improvement focus
Leslie Iburg , Moderator, viaLanguage
Focus in marketing communications for the K12 and Healthcare
Business Units at K12Translate and viaLanguage. Previous
experience working directly with ESL/ELL students and adults.

4. K-
Multicultural K-12 Communication (Leslie)6
Meeting the challenges…
• Effective communication in
changing classrooms
• Minimize cost and time
• Increase parental involvement

5. Planning Your Multicultural Communications
merhaba
¡Hola! hei
hujambo
Hello!
halló !
zdravo

6. Trap 1: Failure to Recognize Cultural Norms &
Differences in the Classroom
- Shift in faces and voices in America’s
schools over last 30 years
• Religious practices
• Parental involvement
- Solution
• Develop closer relationships with children
and parents

7. Trap 2: Literacy Levels and Readability (Lillian)
- An increase in diversity of language and
differences in cultural values and beliefs
• Student vs. parent literacy
• Multi-generational differences
• Cultural norms affect active involvement

8. Trap 3: Plan for Content and Languages (Prakalpa)
- Is my content translation ready?
• Write content that can be used by multiple teams and easily
updated.
• Avoid jargon, slang and cultural references that won’t translate
well.
• Keep content simple to limit the cost of future edits/changes.
- Is this the right language?
• Essential to understand the linguist preference and regional
nuance of your audience.
• Use terminology and style of a specific culture or region.

9. Trap 4: Translation Oversight (Lillian)
- It’s not just about words…
• Cultural nuances, context, fonts, non-
Romanized languages, compound words,
dialects and other influences.
• Technology

10. Trap 5: Empty Toolbox Thinking (
Prakalpa)
Set yourself up for success
Create and leverage
your AssetTrio
– Style Guide
– Glossary
– Translation Memory

11. Translation Memory-What is it? (Prakalpa)
Translation Memory (TM) is a database tool that allows you to save
translations and recycle previously translated segments for future use.
– Bi-directional tool
– Needs upfront time and investment
– Stores segments that are previously translated
– Compares new segments against the Memory
– Drives consistency
Documents
TM
Translation
Memory

12. Trap 6: Quality Control (Prakalpa)
– Work with experienced, native speaking translators that
understand US education system
– Create Asset Trio: Style Guide, Glossary, TM
– Involve community reviewers

13. Trap 7: Plan Ahead and Save (Prakalpa)
– Translations are ad hoc and not well-planned
– Prioritize the most spoken languages
– Different documents add up and cost time and money
– Incorporate compliance documents in your annual budget
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.

14. Bundle Translations (Prakalpa)
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15. Trap 8: Share, Reuse and Recycle (Prakalpa)
You are not alone…
– Work with your Language Service
Provider to archive past projects for later
use
– Reuse and share translations within your
school district
– Centralize Translation Memory – sharing
across the district

16. Summary (Leslie)
Recognize cultural impact
Plan, plan, plan
Utilize the right tools, technology and teams

17. Resources (Leslie)
– TsaiComms
• www.tsaicomms.com
– The Center for Health and Health Care in Schools
• www.healthinschools.org
– National Center on Immigration Integration Policy –
• http://www.migrationinformation.org/integration/language_portal
– US Department of Education
• http://www.ed.gov/index.jhtml
– Office of Refugee Resettlement
• http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/orr/

18. Thank You! (Leslie)
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