Breaking the Language Barrier
How technology can enhance multilingual communication
We live in an increasingly interconnected world. Information technology is allowing individuals, organizations, businesses, and governments to communicate instantaneously across vast distances, and at the same time, immigration is making American society itself more ethnically and culturally diverse.
Both of these trends are putting pressure on schools. Educators need to find new ways to communicate with parents of students who speak only limited English, and they must learn how to offer all students opportunities to collaborate with their peers from other cultures. Fortunately, those tasks are made easier by a variety of multilingual web and computer-based technologies. These free services can translate online, search foreign-language web sites, and help forge partnerships between U.S. schools and their counterparts around the world.
The need for multilingual communication will continue to grow over the next half century. By 2050, Hispanics, non-Hispanic blacks, Asians, and Native Americans will account for approximately half the U.S. population, nearly double the current ratio of 27 percent. Hispanics will comprise nearly a quarter of the population and Asian Americans more than 10 percent. Clearly, schools will have a responsibility to communicate to large groups of linguistically diverse parents and students as well as to other members of their communities.
The Internet is a tremendous resource for accomplishing this task. According to Market Data Retrieval, 90 percent of schools currently have access to the Internet. As the Internet continues to grow, more teachers and administrators will begin developing web pages that contain information about a school, a curriculum, or other topics. School leaders can offer limited-English-speaking parents access to this information by directing their attention to several free online translators.
Translation services
A recently released free online translation service, Free Translation by Transparent Language, provides text and web page translation from English to Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese as well as from Spanish, French, and German to English.
Because these translations are created by software packages rather than human translators, absolute accuracy might be an issue. But if they are used to share a general understanding of the material, they can be an effective support system for learning and communication.
Another free service that provides a more visually appealing translation is Alta Vista Babelfish, which can translate entire web pages or inputted text. As with other services, this translation offers approximately six paragraphs of text per translation.
An Israeli company, Babylon.com Ltd., can provide instantaneous dictionary translations from English to Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Hebrew, Portuguese, or Dutch. With Babylon, second-language students possess a computer dictionary that works online with the web and with e-mail as well as offline with word processing programs, spreadsheets, or any other text-integrated program. One advantage is that students don't have to load a CD-ROM or web page dictionary for each word they want to translate. The service allows users to right-click on a word on any web page to receive an immediate definition and translation. Babylon appears to hold great potential for Hispanic and Asian American ESL students. It is currently available for free download (for a limited time).
In addition, commercial translation services are also available for schools. For example there are software packages that produce student registration forms, applications for free and reduced-price lunch, and other commonly used forms in various languages.
Multilingual search engines can be used interchangeably with online translation services to locate curriculum resources that support learning in a student's mother tongue. After translating a term into the other language, a teacher can use these search engines to locate materials.
One such search engine is AltaVista Digital, which can search for web sites in 25 languages. Another is Euroseek, which can find resources in 29 languages, including Welsh, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Macedonian.
There are many other search engines that support language resources on the web. School administrators and teachers should work to identify the languages used by their students at home and look for search engines in these languages.
Worldwide partners
In addition to translation, multilingual resources can help schools and classrooms build partnerships around the world. In fact, American educators can learn a great deal from the collaboration now taking place between teachers in various countries in the European Union. One example is European Schoolnet (EUN), whose object is to promote the use of information and communications technologies in European schools. This organization uses information technology to support teachers' professional development, foster cooperation among European schools, and offer other pedagogical and information services.
For these European teachers to communicate and collaborate, they must speak with each other in one of the many languages of the European Union: English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Greek, and Italian. Of course, many European teachers are multilingual, enhancing the likelihood of communication.
In the United States, on the other hand, relatively few educators have the language skills to engage in a global curriculum partnership. But by using web-based technology, U.S. teachers can work with foreign teachers to enhance the learning opportunities for their students. In fact, some are already involved in an international collaboration project through an online virtual collaboration project called I*EARN, or the International Education and Resource Network.
I*EARN is located in more than 60 nations, including the United States, and works in 29 languages. It describes itself as "a global community of youth, teachers, and youth service leaders committed to using telecommunications to make a meaningful difference in the world as part of the educational process." Many I*EARN projects support extensive language and cultural understanding.
Sharing stories and games
Two of these projects give students a chance to exchange information about folktales and folk games native to their countries. In the Folk Games Project, students from Romania, Russia, Kazakhstan, the United States, Latvia, Spain, Argentina, Italy, Lithuania, Uganda, and Croatia share a variety of games: funny games, games focusing on nature, games related to human life, and tongue twisters. The project began last fall and will run through March 31. An accompanying folktales project brings together students in Argentina, Australia, the Czech Republic, Ghana, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and the United States. To find out about participating schools, visit the school database.
Multilingual software can help educators in programs such as I*EARN communicate across language barriers.
"The main difficulty we face when working internationally is the language barrier," says Felix Cardozo, a teacher in the I*EARN project from Salta, Argentina. "To help with the language issue, we used online translators and Babylon."
"Language has always been the main barrier for participation in international projects," adds Marcelo Duran, of La Toma, San Luis, Argentina. "Personally, I have used Babelfish online from AltaVista. My students search for and participate in global projects in I*EARN."
As these online services show, information technology is helping people around the world push the boundaries of space and time. The growing global economy is accelerating the rate of travel, both virtual and real. Companies are expanding and relocating, requiring their workers to communicate in a variety of languages.
The 21st century is full of promise for a wave of information-savvy young people. The challenges for schools is to offer these students multilingual opportunities that will prepare them to be effective information-age workers and global citizens.