by Meredith Muller
Cottonwood High School Community School Director
South Salt Lake is a community rich with diversity. Our residents come from all over the world and speak over 40 languages. Our schools are microcosms of our world, allowing learning beyond the classroom between students and families. It does however create one challenge: communication. Finding someone who speaks more than one language is easy, but someone who can speak three or four, let alone 40?! Impossible. That is why we rely on companies like inWhatLanguage! inWhatLanguage donated $15,000 of in-kind language translations services to our South Salt Lake schools!
inWhatLanguage is a company located in South Salt Lake, specializing in technology and translation services that allow communities to share information. With partners around the world, inWhatLanguage is able to donate reduced or no-cost translation services to communities in need, like our SSL schools.
“Language is something we tend to take for granted here in the US, but for refugees and immigrants struggling to establish new lives and provide for their families, it is one of the greatest barriers to success,” said Sheldon. “We saw the amazing work that United Way of Salt Lake and its partners were doing by providing free medical, vision and dental services to underprivileged families, and we wanted to help.”
We sent the forms needing translation to Sheldon and his team, and they got right to work. So far, they have translated over 47,000 words for our schools. Our medical and vision clinic flyers were translated into our ten most popular languages: Arabic, Burmese, Dari, Farsi, Karen, Nepali, Somali, Spanish, Swahili and Vietnamese — reaching almost 90 percent of our student’s families in their native tongue.
And this is just the start. inWhatLanguage is planning to continue partnering with United Way of Salt Lake to meet all critical language needs in South Salt Lake.
“Our goal is to help make sure they have access to the information they need to build successful lives,” said Sheldon.
It will be exciting to see how this new communication allows us to get more families the medical, vision and dental care they need. We are so grateful to inWhatLanguage for their commitment to students and families in South Salt Lake!
