Educational Organizations Choose Lilt To Help Make Learning Accessible and Approachable Regardless of Native Language, Location

Lewiston Public Schools, Accelerate Learning, Pecege and Lobster Ink join companies around the world partnering with Lilt to enhance localization for in-person, virtual and global learning on all educational levels

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San Francisco, CA - November 10, 2021 - Lilt, the modern language service and technology provider, today announced a series of recent customer wins in the educational ecosystem -- from K-12 to higher education to professional development -- demonstrating the increasing demand for localization and translation services as part of a larger and necessary strategic movement to make learning approachable and accessible regardless of a person’s native language or geographical location.

“Education is borderless - students and families come from all types of backgrounds and speak so many different languages, ready and eager to receive an education,” said Lilt CEO Spence Green. “This makes language the key to unlocking education access for millions around the world. It’s becoming increasingly important for educational institutions - schools and vendors alike - to offer communication and resources in more languages than just English, further ensuring access to high quality education.”

In the US alone, it’s estimated that 22.6% of students don’t speak English at home - a number that has its impact on both students and their families in more ways than one. Furthermore, online learning has experienced enormous growth over the last ten years as more and more students have shown interest in non-traditional ways to learn and gain new skills. In 2019, experts forecasted that the online education industry would reach $350 billion by 2025 - and that was before the pandemic struck.

Lewiston Public Schools

Lewiston Public Schools in Lewiston, Maine has encountered a unique challenge over the last 20 years as the small city of just 36,000 residents saw an influx of Somali immigrants resettling in the community, resulting in a Lewiston population that is nearly 14% Somali. The school system needed to redesign its processes to ensure they were providing a learning environment and community where all students and families, no matter the language they speak, feel at home. 

However, early progress into fixing shortcomings faced challenges, especially from a technological perspective. Prior to Lilt, Lewiston was relying on an integration between its school-specific content management system and Google Translate for all of its localization efforts. In addition to producing mediocre-quality translations, the integration was not two-way - while the content could be translated, it could not be saved and uploaded back into the CMS. The resulting process was fragmented, error-prone, and time-consuming.

With Lilt, however, Lewiston Public Schools now operates with a streamlined workflow that allows them to focus less on the technology and gives them more time back to dedicate to providing families with the information they need, in an accessible and usable format.

"When a family walks in, they should feel welcomed and know that they'll be able to have their questions answered and engage with teachers just as if they were in a place where everyone speaks their native language,” said Hilary Barber, Director of English Language Learner Education at Lewiston Public Schools. "When we came across Lilt, we saw a company with cutting-edge technology that included the reliability and value of human translators. Lilt offers the best of both worlds and enables us to provide the most accurate translations for our community."

Accelerate Learning

Accelerate Learning, whose flagship product STEMscopes creates K-12 math, science, and technology courses, is used by students, guardians, and teachers across the United States. The company embraces hyper-localization, building custom K-12 education materials and resources at the state level. 

“Offering diverse languages is an equity issue, and we want to create an equally effective and equitable learning experience for everyone. It is inequitable to provide content in English while ignoring your Spanish speaking students, so much so that many states are now mandating that content be provided in English and Spanish for materials to even be considered for curriculum inclusion,” said Jason Maxwell, VP of Curriculum Production. “Enabling access to content in a student’s preferred language creates an equitable and inclusive global experience for everyone involved”.

With a focus on math and science, the material faces more complexities and opportunity for error. Lilt’s human-in-the-loop approach allows the not-so “normal conversation” of science content to be communicated correctly and efficiently at scale with local nuance.

Pecege

The team at Brazil-based Pecege, a leading institution offering undergraduate and MBA courses to enable individuals to further their education and build their professional careers, understands that improving education is something that professionals and lifelong learners are looking to do across the globe.

The tools and systems they previously used caused major headaches and delays to their workflows, leading to slowed growth and limited rollout of new courses - ultimately reducing the number of students globally that have access to the high-quality education that Pecege provides.

"We have so many different types of content that we need to translate every month,” said Luiza Paes, Translation Team Lead at Pecege. “But other systems we were using didn’t allow us to produce that volume at that scale, and it was limiting what we could do. Lilt’s technology has completely changed the way we run our localization program."

With Lilt, Pecege quickly found that their localization workflow and translation issues could be resolved. Documents, especially repetitive content, that used to take hours for Pecege to tackle can now be done in minutes because of the tools that they have access to with Lilt.

Lobster Ink

Lobster Ink, a division of Ecolab and a leading behavior-based learning platform that enhances the frontline performance of leading organizations, needed to improve the quality of their translations as well as the turnaround times in order to scale their global efforts. While the company works extensively with international companies and is always in need of translated content, localization teams sit at the end of the content process, slowing go-to-market efforts. They selected Lilt as a partner in these efforts and the results speak for themselves: the number of support tickets from learners decreased, the completion rate for localized content increased, and they’ve been able to more than double the number of supported languages.

For more information about Lilt and its translation solutions for educational institutions, please reach out to contact@lilt.com.

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About Lilt

Headquartered in San Francisco, Lilt is the modern language service and technology provider enabling the global customer experience. Lilt’s mission is to make the world’s information accessible to everyone regardless of where they were born or which language they speak. Lilt brings human-powered, technology-assisted translations to global enterprises, empowering product, marketing, support, e-commerce, and localization teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences to global audiences. Lilt gives industry-leading organizations like Intel, ASICS, WalkMe, and Canva everything they need to scale their localization programs and go-to-market faster. Lilt has additional global offices in Dublin, Berlin, Washington, D.C. and Indianapolis. Visit us online at www.lilt.com or contact us at contact@lilt.com.