The City of East Lansing has formed an innovative partnership with Michigan State University’s Center for Language Teaching Advancement to launch a new translation initiative titled MELTing POT, MSU East Lansing Together: Promoting Outreach through Translations.
The ultimate goal of the MELTing POT initiative is to promote community outreach through translations. As part of the initiative, domestic and international students will collaborate, under the supervision of graduate students and/or faculty members, on translating important documents for the City of East Lansing. The project will begin by focusing on the following languages: Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish and Korean.
“The city has been working to ensure that all residents and visitors, regardless of their national origin, have equal access to city services and amenities,” said East Lansing Mayor Nathan Triplett. “Our goal is to become a model receiving community for international students and scholars, refugees and immigrants. MELTing POT builds on prior efforts to provide translation and interpretation, such as LanguageLine and the city’s international residents webpage.”
“Providing pre-professional experiences for our undergraduate students is an important aspect of their education at MSU,” said CeLTA Executive Associate Director and CeLTA Language School Director Angelika Kraemer. “MELTing POT allows our language students to collaborate with native speakers of the language and apply what they learn in their classrooms in meaningful ways.”
To formally launch the MELTing POT initiative, a series of community resource letters were recently translated into the five focus languages. These letters were rolled out at last weekend’s East Lansing Welcomes the World event. Additional city documents and resources will be posted as they are translated. The hope is to expand the MELTing POT initiative through Global Lansing in the future.