Blogs

By Avantpage School districts have very specific language service needs to support their Limited English Proficient (LEP) families. As a language service provider (LSP) with a mission to connect people linguistically, we’ve worked with several school districts to provide translation and interpretation services successfully. Here are some best practices and recommendations we have for language services in school districts.  Each translation project will vary based on the type of content, the number of graphics, and other factors. However, in general, here’s a very brief overview of the translation process: Translation takes time to get through the different steps in the process. To make sure everyone involved in the process has as much time as possible, schedule translation projects in advance wherever it’s possible.  Unplanned translation needs do come up, especially with health communications, so it’s not always possible to plan. However, when urgent projects come up, the tools that we mentioned previously will help the translators be as efficient as possible. Within districts, schools often have different language support needs based on the makeup of their neighborhood or local community. For consistency’s sake, it’s critical to identify the stakeholders at the school level who will be responsible for communicating your language access needs to your LSP. Whether those district resources are working directly with your LSP or funneling translation requests through a central point of contact to your LSP, it’s important to have standard practices in place to ensure the consistent quality your stakeholders expect.  Translation tools, including translation memory, terminology management, and computer-aided translation tools, all work together to make the translation process more efficient and less costly. According to the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education, one of the steps that school districts need to take is to ensure that interpreters and translators are knowledgeable about any specialized terms or concepts during the process. As with many industries, schools have specific terminology relating to individual education plans, policies, safety information, health and wellness information, evaluations, parent letters, and much more. When it comes to the translation process, standardizing these terms and storing them in a translation memory is vital for content reuse, which leads to a consistent user experience and a more efficient and less costly translation process. Here’s how these translation tools work together. A translation memory is a database that stores source text and the equivalent translated content. It’s organized in a way so that you can compare new content with content that’s already been translated to identify matches. As you add more translation projects, the TM continues to grow, thus building a library of content. Identifying and managing terminology is another important step in the localization process. As we mentioned earlier, education has specific terminology that can be reused across different communications. The key to maximizing terminology management is to identify the key terms before a project goes to translation. In this case, translators can get a step ahead by translating these terms in context, and then they’re added to the TM for use during the project and for future projects. CAT tools are software programs that pull everything together for translators. They work with a translation memory to automatically populate the translated terms. CAT tools then compare new text strings with existing text strings to determine the reuse potential.  The translation tools are intertwined, so it’s best to do some work upfront to maximize the tools’ potentials. For school districts, we recommend having all the translation points of contact get together to compare and create a terminology list to develop one standard list to share with your LSP. This way, your audience will see the same translated terms regardless of where they are in the district. Once you have a standardized terminology list, share it with anyone who creates content. In working with Limited English Proficient stakeholders, providing a variety of written and verbal communication will give all involved the whole picture of a student’s progress. Oral interpretation is key to providing immediate answers and clarifying questions, and it helps to facilitate a deeper understanding than a written translation can sometimes provide. Emergencies, disciplinary or congratulatory conversations or simply discussing student progress are all cases where interpretation is preferred. While many LEP families may wish to use bilingual family members to interpret these conversations, but it’s best to have a neutral interpreter.  Avantpage’s Language Solutions for School Districts We are a language service provider that has been serving the LEP population for almost 20 years. We’ve worked with various school districts to establish a standardized process, create terminology, and deliver translation projects for both urgent and routine communications in multiple languages. Our language services include website copy, communications to families, individual education plans (IEPs), and many more. We also provide on-demand, immediate access to certified interpreters via phone to can enable real-time conversation with LEP partners. 
For more information about language services for school districts, contact us at [email protected] or (530) 750-2040. We’re here to support the myriad of translation and interpretation needs.

By Joanna Oseman Let’s face it–navigating our healthcare system can be a challenge for anyone. From finding a provider to searching for the right form, it’s almost never a simple activity. Now imagine that you don’t speak or read English as you try to navigate through our healthcare system. Think about what a challenge that would be. With 25 million Americans speaking English less than very well, this scenario is unfortunately all too common. So what can be done about it? Healthcare providers have the opportunity to explore what it’s like for a Limited English Proficient (LEP) patient and their family to navigate their way by mapping out a patient journey and then exploring options to make improvements. A patient journey is a process of looking at the patient experience with a healthcare provider during each touchpoint in the process. It begins when a patient starts searching for a provider (pre-visit) to the appointment (visit) through after-care (post-visit). Going through the exercise of mapping out this journey can help providers see where there are gaps or areas that could use improvement, leading to better overall experiences and reducing inefficiencies. A patient journey for someone who’s a native English speaker is one type of experience. For those who aren’t native English speakers, that patient journey can look quite different due to the language barrier, both written and verbal. Let’s take a look at the LEP patient experience. Doing research online to find, validate, and evaluate healthcare providers is the way of the future. Check out these interesting statistics about the pre-visit step: What does this mean for healthcare providers? Think about the online (including mobile) pre-visit experience. What is that experience like for the LEP population? Can they easily find your business? Are they able to read about it in their language or is it English only? To attract more members, consider the following actions: The actual visit includes everything from finding the office (maps and signage), the check-in process (electronic or paper plus any COVID-related instructions), the appointment itself, and any necessary paperwork (educational resources, follow-up instructions, referral information, and more). What does this mean for healthcare providers? Consider each step of the appointment process, and evaluate the experience for the LEP population. The experience doesn’t end with the appointment. There might be follow-up appointments to make, calls with test results, care instructions, updates in patient portals, and more. What does this mean for healthcare providers? While the post-visit process varies for each individual, the same concepts that we mentioned earlier also apply here. At Avantpage, we provide a full suite of translation and interpretation services aimed at meeting the needs of immigrants and other LEP populations. One of our core industries is healthcare; we believe in promoting health through quality translation. We understand the LEP member journey, and we’re here to support you. We offer all the core services to enhance the LEP member journey, including localization and translation as well as interpretation, in over 150 languages. Visit our website to learn more about how we can help healthcare providers improve their customers’ experiences while also realizing process efficiencies. Read more about how healthcare organizations can support their LEP members in providing multilanguage support. For more information, contact us at [email protected] or (530) 750-2040. We’re here to support your LEP patients’ journeys.

A special election for the recall of California Gov. Gavin Newsom is set for September 14, 2021. The last time this happened in California was in 2003 when Gov. Gray Davis was recalled and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger. When an election occurs, there are strict requirements for what and how content needs to be delivered to voters so that they can become informed and prepared to vote. The California Secretary of State’s elections office produces a statewide Voter Information Guide (VIG), which must be translated for LEP voters into nine threshold languages: Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Korean, Khmer, Hindi, Thai, and Japanese. We were recently awarded the project of translating the Voter Information Guide for the upcoming recall election. What’s more, we also translated the VIG for the 2003 recall election. Since then, we’ve translated 14 VIGs for five primaries, six general elections, and three special elections (the 14^th being the September 2021 special election). A lot has changed since 2003, but one thing that hasn’t changed is our ability to deliver the translated versions of the VIG, despite the challenges that come along with it each time. These challenges include very tight turnaround times, complex formatting, and word counts of around 150,000 English source words. Avantpage was formed to help immigrants and to work with local and state government agencies that serve them, so this type of work is right up our alley. As our chief executive officer, Luis Miguel, explained, “Our commitment to enable immigrants to participate in our democratic process remains as strong now as it was in 2003. We’re honored to be able to continue to serve our immigrant population.” In preparation for this special election, we’ll share what it takes to translate a VIG for the state of California, and we’ll also look back at how things have changed since that 2003 election. As the saying goes, it takes a village. And it definitely takes a village to translate a VIG into nine languages with a very tight turnaround time. Here’s an example: we translated the Voter Information Guide for the presidential election in November of 2020. This 112-page guide contained 66,400 words with 12 propositions, along with an accompanying TOPL (Text of Proposed Laws) publication of 96 pages and 69,300 words. We had 27 days to translate and format it into the nine required languages. To complete this project, we worked with: We worked around the clock to deliver this important document for our LEP voters. The actual translation of the content is just one part of the overall translation process. Proofing that content is another major step. Since the translated version must look identical to the English, this visual proofing is a critical, detailed-oriented, and time-consuming part of the process. Here are just a few examples of the types of things that we must proof: As you can see, the proofing step also takes a village of detail-oriented language experts to produce the final VIG for print. Back in 2003, when we worked on the special election VIG, we certainly didn’t have the team that we just described. In fact, our CEO, Luis, did the bulk of the work from his garage, along with two part-time UC Davis students doing project management and proofing, and one part-time bookkeeper. In 2003, just six languages were required. Fast-forward to today: we have 35 full-time employees, in three main offices, with dedicated areas of Operations, Business Development, People Operations, and Systems. We’ve grown from annual revenue of $500,000 to $5M today. And as we mentioned earlier, we’re now on our 14^th VIG project with a total of nine languages. Luis stated, “The combination of people, process and technology to provide quality language services to CA government serving immigrants was the basis of our success then, and remains so today. We welcome the opportunity to serve our LEP population in this capacity.” As a company based in California providing government translation services, we understand what it takes to meet the requirements of the LEP population for elections. We can scale up our dedicated teams to accommodate these types of projects without affecting our other client work. How can we help you increase voter engagement? Reach out to us to learn more. We’re happy to provide you with a free quote.