What is The Language Bank?
The Language Bank is a free service provided by the Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences. Its mission is to provide translation and interpreting services to local non-profits, social services organizations, and outreach initiatives. The program provides our volunteers – Rutgers students, staff, and faculty – with the opportunity to engage with and serve the local community.
How does it work?
Prospective clients create an account to enroll in the program, and then submit a description of a translation project. We evaluate the project to ensure it is appropriate for The Language Bank and, if so, match it with a volunteer translator/interpreter. High-stakes projects or those requiring certified translations or under tight deadlines are not suitable for The Language Bank.
Translator or Interpreter?
Translators work with “written material”, that is, they translate and adapt written content from one language to another. Examples are creating and adjusting subtitles for a movie, localizing a website or translating a contract.
Interpreters, on the other side, work with "oral or sign language", helping people with different languages to communicate. There are interpreters working in hospitals, in court and in international settings such as press conferences or meetings.
What do we do?
- We assist with small translating and interpreting requests from New Jersey non-profit community-based and educational organizations.
- We also assist units within Rutgers that support outreach to various populations in the state and towards its own student body.
- Examples of documents we translate are fliers, instructions sheets, short policies, presentations, infographics, postcards, posters, documentation for community-based research, etc.
- Format warning: Please upload editable formats, such as Office formats or editable text formats. PDFs and images need to be converted and may not preserve the formatting. The Language Bank does not offer desktop publishing services, so we are not responsible for the final document's formatting and may provide the translation in plain text format.
What don't we do?
- We do not translate medical documents or interpret medical procedures.
- We do not translate legal documents or interpret legal procedures such as asylum or immigration cases.
- We do not take requests from for-profit companies.
- We do not translate private documents such as invoices, visa documents, driver´s licenses, etc.
- We do not do work outside of New Jersey.
- We do not translate excessively long documents! Please keep your requests under 2000 words. For longer projects, please reach out to us and we’ll evaluate your request:
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We do not do professional, paid translating and interpreting. All of our partners understand that we are volunteers and we cannot guarantee error-free translations.
Disclaimer
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY LANGUAGE BANK SERVICES DISCLAIMER
The Language Bank is a service provided by The Language Center that partners volunteer faculty, staff and students from Rutgers University who are interested in providing unofficial translation and interpreter services with campus and community agencies who need translation or interpretation services. The Language Bank is not a professional translation or interpreting service and, therefore will not provide any certification. The Language Bank provides no warranty and accepts no responsibility for the accuracy or the completeness of any translation or interpreting service. Neither Rutgers University nor the volunteer translators or interpreters working within The Language Bank will be responsible for any reliance or negative consequences resulting from their services. Accordingly, translation or interpreter services provided by The Language Bank should not be used for any official or legal purpose. Individuals and agencies that use The Language Bank agree to the disclosure of confidential information that may be contained in source material being translated or interpreted.