By Inés Francom
News Editor

A new school year brings about lots of new things; new classes, friends, and life events all quickly happening at once. However, it also brings about some constant things. The hot shining sun in late August, a nervous pit churning in your stomach, morning homerooms, and the continuous piling up of emails in your student inbox (Ping!). 

Full of important information, emails are always being sent to both students and parents at R.J. Reynolds High School. 

“[The emails include] any school-wide news, any updates of what’s happening for the week,” RJR Principal Calvin Freeman said. “Any reminders [that] could be about immunizations, it could be about testing, it could be about particular things that [are] happening at the school. We want parents to be well informed of those things.”

When registering their students, parents can opt-in to receive emails in their preferred language on PowerSchool. For Spanish-speaking students at RJR, these emails are translated to Spanish. However, they are not correctly translated, with mistakes littering the emails sent.

“It’s understandable,” senior Amy Garcia-Cisneros, a recipient of the translated emails, said. “But it can be better.” 

One email from RJR sent to students on August 8th, 2024, was titled “Fiesta de pintura y maquillaje para personas mayores en estacionamiento” which translates to: ‘party of paint and make-up for old people in the parking lot’. Which is misleading as the contents of the email were describing the steps seniors had to complete in order to paint their parking spots.

“We’re working from a [district-wide] program [called Thrillshare],” Freeman said. “So when we go on to the program, we can put our [emails] in there, and then it says translate, and so we can send from there.”

Translation software such as Thrillshare, or Google Translate, while very advanced programs, lack the understanding of subtext, word connotation, and phrases necessary for accurate translation. 

For example, in a Spanish email sent by RJR in January 2024, the program titled the email  “Bombardeo de revisión del COE” which translates to bombing of revision of COE. While this email was translated from English text that intended to express ‘a lot of’ revisions, the result from parents who saw the Spanish translation was an immediate feeling of panic. Mistakes like this are easy for programs to miss as they lack the human touch essential to translation, something Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools seems to recognize. 

“We do not use Google Translator,” Manager of the Parent Engagement Program, Family Literacy Program, and district’s translation team, Nareny Martinez said. “You can find so many mistakes there.” 

The translation team Martinez manages works with WS/FCS to translate and send out their communications, often seen through district emails, social media posts, or the WS/FCS website. 

“Our interpreters and translators are certified,” Martinez said. “They go through a two-week training so they are certified to do this type of [translation] work.”

While there is a team of translators at the ready at the district level, those same resources haven’t been felt by RJR, where instead, Thrillshare is used to send and translate messages.

“[Thrillshare is] what we’ve been provided,” Freeman said. “We don’t have many translators anymore. We have two staff members [Mr. Beale and Ms. Jolly], who are doing most of our translation when we have an emergency. We used to have a Spanish speaking secretary. We had [her] for three of the four years that I’ve been here, but this year we just were unable to find anyone.”

While staff members, family engagement coordinators, and workers from the front office that are bilingual have been invited to join the two-week translation trainings held by the district, RJR still  depends on software programs like Thrillshare. Without sufficient translators to double check messages sent, or translate the messages themselves, RJR was unaware of the mistranslation . 

“[The next step is] we reach out to Thrillshare and let them know, ‘Hey, we’re experiencing some problems with translation,’ I think [I was given] a couple examples and I’ll share that with [Thrillshare] and see if they can get any fixes in their program,” Freeman said. “Then it becomes something that gets weighed and it’s like, is it more important for this amount of information to go out as opposed to the one or two mistranslations.”

While miscommunication is better than absolutely no communication, some RJR parents believe the mistranslations happen too often and distort the meaning too much for there to be any reliable communication. 

“It is critically important that we provide families with information in their first language,” Chief of WS/FCS Communications and former Greensbro city communications specialist, Amanda Killian Lehmert said. “It’s my commitment. We don’t get it right every single day, but I think we’re doing a lot right.”

While the district’s translation departments capabilities are not used throughout all of WS/FCS, it is a valuable resource that not all districts have. 

“I have not seen that kind of commitment from other government agencies,” Killian Lehmert said. “By comparison, the city of Greensboro, which is actually larger, […] did not employ a single translator.”

With so many students at RJR from non-English-speaking families, it’s important for them to actually be receiving the communications intended, and with a district that speaks about improving community engagement with students, some students see it as disappointing for these mistranslations to be seen throughout RJR Spanish emails. 

“We should do better to include everyone, and having [emails] misinterpreted, that’s not including everyone,” Hispanic senior Laurencia Pennix said. “That’s not being generous like you should. You should be going up and above, bare minimum. You should reach [for] the highest.”