Thanks for the feedback, I was afraid of investing any money into a software program or the time into a free service to find out it didn't meet our needs. I have talked with our City School Board Technology Office she stated there are translators available at each school, but during the summer when you're trying to get ready for the beginning of school they aren't as available. I will talk with her again and suggest this option to her. It would be great if we could either email or fax our items in and have them returned in Spanish to help us meet our deadlines. Thanks again for all the suggestions. Hope everyone has a wonderful school year!
Check with your school board office. We have a county wide translater and that is her job to translate all PTO and notes home to the parents. We fax it to her in english and she faxes it back in spanish.
I tried babelfish. For the English phrase "I love cookies," it spit out "I have romantic interests in cookies" in Portuguese. You can see where this could create problems.
I agree with kelleyraek. You need a real person to translate. Babblefish and other translating programs are the butt of many jokes by bilingual people.
I do speak Portuguese. Believe me, you need someone bilingual who can make sure you don't use something that seems techinically correct but is socially unacceptable.
It would be better to hire someone to translate if you don't have someone who will do it for free than risk saying something inappropriate or making the instructions have a completely different meaning or no meaning at all.
Just so you know...we used free trial software to translate materials last year and our bilingual advocate, who does our translating, asked us NOT TO BOTHER! The translations werent close enough to the actual meaning to be of any help to her. We looked into other software as well and were told by a translation expert that they are all about the same...we decided it wasn't worth our money. Instead, we've kept copies of all translated documents from the past school year so that we can simply change days and time for the coming year.
I'm still a couple of weeks away from having it done and giving it to a translator to see how good it is, but I think I originally got the recommendation from someone on this forum. It's free, so the price is certainly right!
