Although most U.S. schools are on break in July, American Language Services is busy serving the interpretation and translation needs of some of the country’s largest and well-known educational institutions. And while Students might be on their summer break, and many families are taking vacations this month, especially during the Independence Day holiday, we’re hard at work making the world a little smaller.
In Los Angeles, also known as the City of Angels (or just L.A.), we helped the Los Angeles Unified School District. Covering an area that’s more than 700 square miles, it’s one of the largest public school systems in the world. More than 90 languages besides English are spoken and more than 160,000 students are learning English as a second language. That’s not surprising in a city that’s home to people from more than 140 countries and 224 different languages.
In July alone we provided the district with Armenian interpretation services. And in the past, we have provided translation and interpretation services in Russian, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, Khmer, Arabic, Cantonese, Greek, Haitian-Creole, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese.
Up north, in San Francisco we interpreted for the University of California, San Francisco, one of the world’s leading medical schools. UCSF needed Spanish-to-English language assistance. Spanish is considered by many to be California’s second language, which shouldn’t be a surprise when you consider that the state belonged to Spain and then Mexico before it became a part of the U.S. in 1850.
