Coast to coast, many Americans view the vast differences in language throughout the country's "melting pot" as barriers that are difficult to overcome. But not senior Sebastian Chaskel: A native of Colombia and a Spanish-speaker himself, Chaskel sees them as opportunities.
Through the Tisch College's Citizenship and Public Service Scholars program, Chaskel has created the Community Language Bank in Somerville, a company that provides affordable translation services to organizations and businesses in the Somerville area.
"Right now, it's an Internet-based non-profit organization," Chaskel said. "We train Tufts students - and in the future we'll also train community people - in the skills of translation and interpretation, and then we hire them to provide this service at an affordable rate to entities in Somerville."
According to Chaskel, those entities consist of community organizations, local businesses and local government bodies that have long struggled to meet the needs of multi-lingual Somerville, which Chaskel described as "an immigrant city."
"Many Tufts students don't realize it, but if you go to East Somerville one day, everything is in Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole," he said. According to the City of Somerville's Web site, 29 percent of the population is foreign-born and 36 percent of the population over age five speak a language other than English at home.
As a result, community organizations and local businesses have a hard time interacting with the local community, something Chaskel discovered through personal experience during his sophomore year on the Hill while participating in the Citizenship and Public Service Scholars program.
"I started working with an organization called the Somerville Community Corporation [SCC]," Chaskel said. The Citizenship and Public Service Scholars program requires eight hours per week of work on a public, community-related project.
"My role as a Colombian was to go to Latinos' houses, knock on their doors and basically convince them to come to events organized by SCC. Basically, they weren't getting many Spanish speakers and they weren't getting many immigrants at all," he said.
According to Chaskel, he began to notice a connection between language barriers and the noticeable lack of community involvement from immigrants.
"Immigrants would not want to come to meetings if the meetings were not in their language and if the signs for the meetings were not in their language," Chaskel said. Though the need was strong, he explained, there was a lack of affordable translators and even fewer interpreters, who translate orally as words are spoken.
"People wouldn't come to the meetings because these services, when they were offered, they weren't very good," he said. "Often things were interpreted wrong, or the signs were translated digitally on the computer, or there was just none at all."
From this experience, Chaskel said, the idea for Community Language Bank was born.
"I spent my time at this organization noticing that this was a big problem, and soon I realized it was a problem for many organizations in Somerville, and that it was a problem in the city in general," he said. "The immigrant population - people who don't speak English very well - they don't have much contact with the rest of the Somerville residents."
After dealing with the issue first-hand, Chaskel decided to do something about it.
"As an international student at Tufts, I know many people who are bilingual, because they learned another language here at Tufts or they came to Tufts from different countries," he said. "I realized that many of them would be very happy to translate documents for the community, go to events as interpreters."
"That's where the idea of the Language Bank came out of," Chaskel added. "The idea that there was this very big need in the community, and that there were students who were willing to help fulfill that need and were actually very interested in doing so."
After a meeting with members of SCC and the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, Chaskel launched Language Bank. So far, he said, it's been a success.
"Right now, we've trained about 25 Tufts students as translators and interpreters, and they speak Spanish and Portuguese," Chaskel said. "[The system is] all Web-based. An organization uploads a document, say by when they need it translated, and before they know it, a translator has downloaded it, has translated it, someone else proofreads it, and then it goes back to the organization."
The company won a $50,000 first-place prize in the Frigon Competition in Social Entrepreneurship in May. Later that month, Chaskel was awarded the Paul and Elizabeth Montle Prize for Entrepreneurial Achievement. According to Chaskel, the awards helped the company gain resources and legitimacy early on. Now, he said, he's looking to the future.
"We're running as a business right now, but we're not charging, and we're not paying; we're letting it all be for free for a while, just to make sure that it works," he said. "We expect to begin working as a real business, charging and paying, sometime this month. That's my challenge right now."
To approach his goal of becoming a for-profit organization, Chaskel has been filing legal papers and setting up bank accounts. Right now, he's working to overcome a slight hurdle the organization faced when the state denied its request to become incorporated, since the organization's name has the word "bank" in the title but is not a real bank. Once he works out the kinks, though, Chaskel said he has high hopes.
"In the future, I would really like for it to expand, for it to be at other universities, other cities," he said. "In many cities in the U.S., language is perceived as a barrier.
I don't think language has to be an issue.
"Here, we've created an opportunity for business, for communication, for dialogue," he said.
To Chaskel, Community Language Bank has nowhere to go but up.
"What I love about this is we have students who are being trained, which is very cool because it means a lot to be trained in translation and interpretation - it's like you can move between the languages and speak, and it's a great asset ... At the same time, they're getting paid for what they're doing, and they're fulfilling a very important need," he said.
"The way that it works out, there can be so many winners," Chaskel added. "It's like a win-win-win-win situation."
