When to translate (or not)

jochan, bsersion, or Song, do either of you have any tips here?

Started w/ the top 10 languages.
Now we have Dual Language programs in Spanish and Mandarin, so they are required.
We now also focus on communities who don't have English proficiency or are refugees, or don't have good understanding of how school works here, and do less with Japanese or Korean, for example, as those families tend to have someone who knows English. So we are doing more with Arabic, Karen, Burmese and so on.

Cincinnati Public Schools translates surveys into the top 3 home languages of our families (Spanish, Arabic and French) for Title I Program. The Communications Dept. follows the same policy for other parent communications, and recently began translating into a 4th language; Nepali. Sean offered some good tips for translation implementation.

Typically it is best practice to use Qualtrics' translate feature first, which uses Google Translate, to give your translation a starting point, and then to have translators edit the content afterwards. This helps save your translators a lot of time and allows them to only make edits for grammar and dialects, opposed to having to write the entire translation from scratch. Most districts I have talked to use this method as it is preferred from the translators.