At this stage of the pandemic, it’s no secret that a strong school-home connection can make or break a student’s learning experience. But in an all or partially virtual world, building and maintaining these connections with parents and families can seem impossibly difficult—especially in multilingual communities. Today, nearly 25% of public school students speak a language other than English at home.
To help you engage with your entire community, no matter the language, we’re proud to introduce preferred language translation on Remind. Preferred language translation lets you effectively reach all families in their home languages—from direct conversations to district-wide notifications.
With preferred language translation, messages are automatically translated into 90+ languages on the Remind app and on the web. Parents can select their home language for messaging on Remind, or teachers and administrators can manually update preferred languages for hard-to-reach families.
When you send a message to a multilingual group, all you need to do is compose your message in English. From there, you can see which languages your message will be translated into, confirm the number of recipients per language, and preview the translated text, all from one place—no copying and pasting from Google Translate required.
Plus, translations are two-way so you can answer questions and build stronger relationships. When a parent responds to your message in their home language, it’s translated back to the preferred language you’ve set.
Along with classroom-level features, organizations with Remind Hub will have access to preferred language translation for community-wide notifications—including school and districtwide messages and, for organizations with urgent messaging, urgent announcements.
With urgent messaging, multilingual recipients will receive a translated, text-to-voice call from a native speaker as a fallback if they are unreachable by text message. Districts that are eligible to roster through CSV sync can also sync home language data from their student information system (SIS) to Remind to further improve reach.
And, last but not least, we’re introducing two-way SMS translation as part of Remind Hub so families without smartphones or broadband can still receive (and reply to) messages in their home languages—and help you make communication even easier for everyone in your community.
Preferred language translation will be available soon! In the meantime, you can follow us on Twitter for updates and learn more about Remind Hub for schools and districts.
