This training was the sixth and final one for the employees, all of whom are bilingual and routinely find themselves stepping into the role of interpreter or translator in addition to their usual duties. On Friday morning, school employees filed into a large conference room at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, code-switching between English and Spanish as they greeted one another and got settled in. For that reason, Spanish is the language most often needed for translation and interpretation in the district. More than 44 percent of Holyoke residents identified as Puerto Rican in the 2010 census, and 70 percent of students in Holyoke Public Schools are Puerto Rican, according to the district’s website. “We got feedback that over time it hasn’t been consistent - parents getting information from schools - both in translation and interpretation,” he said. “In my time here there’s been some concern about the need for greater access for families for information and dialogue in their native language,” Zrike said.Īnd in a district where English is a second language for almost 43 percent of students, those services are in high need. But Holyoke’s receiver and superintendent, Stephen Zrike, said the district hasn’t been providing employees with the training they need to do that work in a more formal capacity. Interpretation - the act of translating spoken language - and translation - the act of interpreting written documents - are vital skills that are an art form in and of themselves. “Right now I don’t know of any other school districts who are investing this much in training their people who do translation and interpreting,” Regina Galasso, the Translation Center’s director, said. The trainings were designed and presented by the Translation Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which provides translation services and trainings to a range of clients.
Perez spoke to the Gazette Friday, when she and more than 20 other Holyoke school employees and educators took part in the last in a series of certification workshops meant to give them the tools to be better translators and interpreters at their schools. And when a translated document was eventually provided to the parent, some of the words - “sight words” and “decode,” for example - didn’t have easy translations into Spanish. “First of all, they didn’t give her the form in Spanish,” Perez said. Recently, the 31-year-old family and community engagement coordinator found herself thrust into that role during a meeting for a parent who needed to sign her child’s individualized education program, or IEP. HOLYOKE - As a bilingual employee in the Holyoke Public School system, Nikita Perez finds herself doing a lot of translation and interpretation - work that can be difficult even for those like Perez who are perfectly fluent in two or more languages.