University of Arizona launches pioneering translation and interpretation certificate for speech-language pathology students

The University of Arizona Department of Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences (SLHS), the Norton School of Human Ecology, and the National Center for Interpretation are collaborating to create a new translation and interpretation certificate for speech-language pathology students and professionals in the Tucson community.

“It will be the first program of its kind in the nation that we know of,” said Dr. Mary Alt, Professor and Department Head of SLHS.

The new proposed certificate program, which received approval and funding from the U of A Provost Investment Fund, will build on existing work conducted by the National Center for Interpretation and train students to become bilingual speech-language pathology assistants, equipping them with valuable skills in interpretation and translation. 

The program, Alt said, will have three separate components and two kinds of certificates. One would be for speech-language pathology assistants who are already bilingual but want to receive training in translation and interpretation. The other one would be for speech-language pathology assistants who are monolingual.

The future third component is a proposed online course that will focus on translation and interpretation training for professional speech-language pathologists and speech-language pathology assistants already in the field.

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“For example, any SLPA could take the online program and get specialized training in translation and interpretation. Or if someone already had translation and interpretation skills but wanted to better serve SLPs, they could take that module,” Alt said.

The program was designed in order to address the lack of unique translation skills that are needed for the profession.

“Even though there are translation and interpretation services out there, they typically are really not enough for what we need,” Alt said.

“Not every person that's bilingual has the skill set to be able to translate high level academic or professional jargon,” said Dr. Genesis Arizmendi, an assistant professor in SLHS and cognitive science. 

As a bilingual speech-language pathologist, Arizmendi has been acutely aware of the gaps that exist in the field of speech language pathology when serving communities.

“We work with all people, and we often work with folks that don't speak English. How do we accurately assess people when we don't speak their language?” Arizmendi said. 

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The lack of specially trained and qualified translators, interpreters and SLPs has led to significant difficulties in addressing the needs of Spanish speaking patients.

“We see both an over and under representation of bilingual children in special education,” Arizmendi said. “Meaning that children who actually need services in special education aren't being accurately identified because practitioners are fearful to diagnose them as needing services based on developing proficiency. On the flip side, there are other practitioners that might see a bilingual child struggling and refer them to special education, but it has nothing to do with a disorder.”

According to Arizmendi, the burden of interpretation in speech-language pathology has largely fallen to bilingual professionals, and sometimes even family members.

“Just because a person is bilingual doesn't mean that they have the vocabulary to communicate these specialized terms,” she said. “So working with our interdisciplinary team – the National Center for Interpretation and Speech Language and Hearing Sciences – we have the opportunity to train our students and undergraduates to have this skill set to serve as translators and interpreters. But also to help our communities by alleviating the load on families, and other bilingual practitioners.”

For the team, there is no better place to implement this new, interdisciplinary and community oriented initiative than Tucson. 

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“We have a population in Tucson and throughout the world that is bilingual. So we thought that this would be a natural way to come together and do something that benefits our departments and also our community of bilingual speakers,” said Dr. Sonia Colina, Director of the National Center for Interpretation and Regent’s Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona.

Colina and her colleagues at the National Center for Interpretation, Dr. Holly Silvestri and Paul Gatto, are utilizing their experience in developing certificate programs and expertise in translation, interpretation and community outreach to design and successfully implement the new course. 

Beyond providing enriching education to SLP students, the certificate program is meant to foster relationships with community partners in Tucson.

“We're going to be doing a lot of community outreach,” Alt said.

Part of that work includes creating a network of community partners who will benefit from hiring SLPs and SLPAs with the extra translation and interpretation training.

“Ideally, they might even invest and pay to have future employees do this training,” Alt said.

According to Alt, one of the hopes the team had in designing the multipronged certificate program was to provide accessible pathways to a career within speech language pathology.

“To become an SLP, you need to have a graduate degree. And there are challenges to getting there,” Alt said. “It can be tricky to go to graduate schools in other places; sometimes people can't leave their home, whatever it is. We thought, in Tucson, we have a rich community full of people who are bilingual, and it would be amazing to bridge this gap of having folks who could use their language skills to help meet this need in the community.”

In the future, the team wants to eventually expand the program to incorporate other communities and other languages.

“This could be a model that could be replicated for other languages, which is very exciting,” Colina said.

Alt echoed similar sentiments.

“Across the United States, there are a lot of people who speak languages other than English, and our dream would be to have this for all languages, but we'll start here,” Alt said. “It does take a lot of behind the scenes work to put up a program that will function well, so we're really grateful to have the opportunity to do that. I think this is a way to celebrate and take advantage of some existing resources in our community and ideally across the country.”