In our quest to better serve diverse communities of BVSD, we are always seeking ways to cross language barriers. BVSD has long provided written translations and verbal interpretations of district messages to various audiences, especially parents of our students who are identified as English Language Learners.
 
When our new website launched a few months ago, the question naturally arose about how we could provide this important online information to people in different languages. Our district website alone has more than 2000 pages, and when you add in the pages of our 55 schools' websites, the number becomes quite overwhelming for any human translator to manage, especially since it isn't just one language in which we would need to provide translations. We have more than 70 different languages that are spoken by students and parents in our community.
 
BVSD Webmaster Eric Howell researched the possibilities and came up with a state-of-the-art (and FREE) web translation tool provided by Google. To try it out, please go to http://bvsd.org/translation/Pages/default.aspx. This link will appear on the front page of our website later this week.
 
Seven of the eight most frequently spoken languages in BVSD are among Google's offerings:

We hope Google will add Vietnamese soon, since many of our Hmong community reportedly understand Vietnamese.

Please visit this new web translation tool soon and let us know what you think. I think it is pretty amazing. Once you have clicked into it, you can travel throughout the entire BVSD website AND into the various school sites in whichever language you have selected.

 

It IS machine produced, so it is not as perfect as having an intelligent human being's translation of that page's text, but it IS efficient and we hope it will serve to provide BVSD information to an ever-expanding number of people, regardless of what language they speak.

 

For more information about this tool, please visit Google's FAQ section at http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/faq_translation.html