Budgeting For Translation
Preparing for an upcoming year of translations.

Thinking Ahead…
Do you ever stop to think about how many documents your school or school district produces for students and parents in a typical year? There are handbooks related to school rules and regulations, detailed Individualized education plans for special education departments, new student and parent orientation booklets, applications and permission slips for field trips and after-school programs, and even daily lunch menus! Now, think about how much of that material you need to translate into other languages for your school’s immigrant population. All of those documents really add up over the year in terms of time and money. Here are some easy ways your organization can get a handle on how much to budget every year for translation and localization.

Governmental Compliance
In order to be in compliance with federal regulations like NCLB and Title III, there are some documents that your organization should figure into the budget right off the bat. Anything that is essential to the success of students and to ensure that communication with their family is maintained should be translated. Some of the most important documents related to school regulations, testing information, scholarship applications, and IEPs should be translated.

Demographics in your District
Your district or school gets certain funds for Title III and Title VI in order to make sure certain material is translated to serve Limited English Proficiency families and students. It makes sense to focus your attention and translation budget on the languages that are spoken the most in your district. A good rule of thumb when considering languages you should translate into is whether or not there is a population of 10% within a community. Look at the demographics of your district so that you concentrate on the top two or three immigrant languages that are most represented in your area. If one of these languages is Spanish, for example, even though there may be many countries represented in your immigrant population, it can save money to translate material into a neutral form of Spanish instead of translating the material twice into “Mexican Spanish” or “Cuban Spanish”, for example.

Keep in mind that the demographics of your district might suddenly change during the year. If you budget for a few different languages, you will be able to switch the focus to another language if a population grows. If a population happens to decrease, you could use the extra budget allotment to providing more in-depth translated information to another population instead.

Leverage Past Translations and Translation Memory for Savings
Are there documents your school uses that require small updates every year, but the majority of the text stays the same? In that case, ask your LSP (Language Service Provider) to maintain a Translation Memory for repetitive material, or ask them to archive past projects for quick reference and use later. The next time the document needs to be translated, you’ll likely only have to consider minor revisions instead of the cost of translating the entire set of materials again from scratch.

Also, keep in mind that some web content, once translated, can be repurposed into documents for distribution many times over.

Save on Desktop Publishing Costs
One way to stretch your translation budget further is to consider decreasing the amount of desktop publishing work for your documents. Perhaps conveying important information for some documents is the most important to your students and families, and putting them in a fancy format is not critical to most projects. When you add the costs of redoing some complicated DTP to fit languages that have 25% language expansion rates from English into another languages, the costs can increase substantially.

Sharing Documents within Districts
Sometimes it can really help to pool your resources and documents within your district. If several school within your district send out the same document and only the school name or school phone numbers change, consider translating a document to use as a template throughout your district. Setting things like the date and the school principal’s name within square brackets and letting your LSP know not to translate this material can be a simple way to distribute translated material throughout the system.

K-12 budgets are usually based on the school year, not the calendar year, so it can sometimes help to plan your year so that some material is translated in the calendar year of 2007 and some in 2008, for example. That way you can focus your funds on the times of the year when the most documents need to be translated (for example towards the beginning and ends of school years).