Translation in Higher Education Institutions in the US - Challenges and New Solutions

Every year more international or Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students enroll in higher education institutions (i.e.community colleges, colleges, universities, trade schools, or technology institutes) in the US. Currently, it is estimated that there are more than 5 million international students in the USA enrolled in these institutions. While the number of international student enrollments is expected to increase year by year, the need to support the students and their parents in terms of language services is also growing. For international and LEP students to grow academically and be able to communicate effectively, higher education institutions have to provide efficient language services as required by law.

A plethora of documents need to be translated by professionals as the accuracy requirements of the translations is no less important than medical or legal translations. Certain types of documents even need to be certified. We see a variety of content translation needs. Some of them include but not limited to:

• Academic reference and publications
• International high school diploma translation
• Transcripts
• Higher education institutions’ website content
• Lectures
• Legal materials
• Written marketing materials
• Student and parent consent forms
• All levels of thesis
• Immigration and visa application
• School Policy Guide translation
• IEP Documents (Individual Educational Plan)
• University Admission Materials
• Curriculum Guides
• Recruitment and Financial Aid Forms
  
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The table below shows some of the most international students enrolled in well-known national universities by percentage to give the reader an idea,

Also, the table below represents the number of international students enrolled in top US colleges.

The Challenges and New Solutions

Higher Education Institutions in the US are required to provide translation and interpretation services for international students, LEP individuals, and families. This requirement is a big challenge for many Higher Education Institutions as they are becoming more linguistically diverse. We go through the main issues that the Higher Education Institutions face briefly below.

Quality of the Translations

First and foremost, the most crucial part of higher education translation work is the quality. Low quality and inaccurate translations may cause a great deal of issues to all parties involved. Higher education institutions should look for standardized translation and proofreading services that will give them the highest quality end product to prevent many unrecoverable problems for their students, parents, and organizations.

Cost of Translation Services

Translation projects cost too much and the budget is always tight for most higher education institutions, yet the number of languages they need to support increases every day. Therefore cost savings are becoming more critical tremendously. Some organizations pay minimum fees of $30, $50, and sometimes $100 for short, like less than a page document, and it is not the best way of spending your budget if you ask us.

Speed of the Translation Project Delivery

We also notice that some higher education institutions have to wait for their projects to be translated too long - some state that even a simple quote may take hours or days. With the availability of technologies today, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, everybody should be able to receive instant quotations as well as speed up the translation and proofreading delivery times.

Of course, the challenges are not limited only to the quality, speed, and cost. For example, some organizations are concerned about the privacy of student information and the security of their vendors' IT systems. Or finding translation service providers that support all language translation needs is too difficult. We will not go into details of these in this article. For now, we will conclude with the translation services offered by MotaWord that deliver the highest quality translation solutions without breaking the bank with a fantastic speed.

With all these in mind, we carefully developed an academic translation services solution for higher education institutions through our AI supported translation platform and built a unique Translation Memory (TM). TM is a database that is used to store all your translated strings, sentences, paragraphs. That is, once you pay for document translation, all translated sentences should be stored in a database for future use - use in the sense that you will not pay for the exact sentence translation in that language pair ever. Whether you, your organization staff, your students, or their parents need translation done fast, you take advantage of the TM savings organization-wide.

If you work for a higher education institution and look for reliable translation services in 98 language pairs while taking advantage of no-minimum-fee service with great pricing, look no further! All you need is to get in touch with us:

Email girk@motaword.com or call us at +1 (646) 751-7561 ext:001