About this Program
Imagine for a moment if the flood of emails you receive daily suddenly became an indecipherable series of fonts and symbols. Unfortunately, this scenario is a reality for many Spanish-speaking individuals with limited English skills. It's a situation that is especially frustrating for parents when it comes to online correspondence with their child's school.
IBM's ¡TradúceloAhora! (TranslateNow!) grant program is offering an innovative solution. Using IBM's WebSphere® Translation Server software, hundreds of schools and nonprofit organizations around the world are accessing ¡TradúceloAhora! to not only translate web sites from English to Spanish automatically, but also to translate emails bidirectionally (English-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-English).
IBM has partnered on this project with SER-Jobs for Progress National, a nonprofit organization that addresses the education, employment, and economic needs of Hispanics and other underrepresented groups across America. Many of SER affiliated organizations are participating in this grant program which is helping to bridge the language divide for Spanish speakers.
An independent evaluation of the pilot ¡TradúceloAhora! grant program was conducted by The Tomas Rivera Policy Institute (TRPI), a Latino think-tank at the University of Southern California. The evaluation showed that access to the translation software benefited the organizations and their constituents in significant ways:
- It simplified community outreach specialists' efforts to conduct educational sessions on medical disorders for Spanish-speaking clients;
- It enabled staff to more easily research online information about public services, jobs, clinical and legal issues, and translate the web pages for their clients;
- It enriched English as a Second Language (ESL) program educational resources;
- It augmented and improved Spanish literacy courses;
- It made it easier for clients to find employment at popular job search web sites, helped them apply for jobs online, and write resumes and cover letters;
- It provided GED and ESL students a significant new tool for conducting research, reading the news, viewing transcripts, etc.; and
- It provided an additional teaching resource to enhance basic computer-training courses.
This software is available for free only to individuals who are affiliated with participating schools and nonprofit organizations
