"¡TradúceloAhora! eliminates language barriers between Spanish-speaking parents with limited English skills and educators", said Pamela Dennis, a math teacher in New York. "It's like a veil has been lifted. Now I can directly communicate with these families about the progress their sons and daughters are making in my class." |
After a two-year collaboration with more than 30 different agencies serving the Latino community, IBM is expanding its program aimed at closing one important aspect of the Hispanic Digital Divide – the gap between Spanish and English speakers. An independent evaluation of the initial program, conducted by The Tomás Rivera Policy Institute showed that the ¡TradúceloAhora! automatic translation software benefited the organizations and their constituents in significant ways by:
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Simplifying community outreach specialists' efforts to conduct educational sessions on medical disorders for Spanish-speaking clients; |
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Enabling staff to more easily research online information about public services, jobs, clinical and legal issues, and translate the web pages for their clients; |
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Enriching English as a Second Language (ESL) program educational resources; |
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Augmenting and improving Spanish literacy courses; |
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Facilitating clients in searching for employment at popular job search web sites, helping them apply for jobs online, and write resumes and cover letters; |
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Providing GED (General Education Diploma) and ESL students a significant new tool for conducting research, reading the news, viewing transcripts, etc.; and |
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Providing another teaching resource to enhance basic computer-training courses. |
A key component of the grant program is encouraging users to give feedback on the translation quality. Based on comments from users, IBM can make improvements to the software. So each time a user accesses the software via the web traduceloahora.org web site, they have the latest version of the software. During the two-year grant program, IBM was able to improve the translation quality by 30 percent.
¡TradúceloAhora! (Translate Now!), is a software program that translates e-mails and Web pages bi-directionally (English-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-English). The easy-to-use technology provides a pathway to help Hispanics facilitate their interaction with the community at large. In practice, Spanish-speaking parents can use ¡TradúceloAhora! to e-mail their child's teacher in their own language. This keeps parents involved in their children's progress which is critical to a child's success. In the classroom, Spanish-speaking students can use the translation capability on Web pages to keep up with classroom curricula while they learn English.
¡TradúceloAhora! is accessed through a Web site using a password. In addition to translating web sites automatically from English to Spanish, the technology allows Spanish-speaking families to trade e-mails with English-speaking school teachers and to read the school district's Web pages in their own language.
After registering on the Web site, users can send an e-mail from any e-mail system they use and have it automatically translated. The translation software translates the message automatically and sends a second, translated version of the e-mail within minutes.
¡TradúceloAhora! is based on IBM's WebSphere translation technology. It is continually improved by users of the system who provide feedback on the translations, which makes this one of the most robust translation software technologies available.
The grant program is in its fourth year and now more than 460 schools and nonprofit organizations, in 6 countries (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela and the US) now have access to this technology. Click here for a list of the organizations participating in the program in the U.S. and Latin America.
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