Case Study: Denver Public Schools achieves dramatic translation quality and productivity gains with RWS (SDL Trados Studio)

Helping Denver Public Schools set new standards in translation

Denver Public Schools, a rapidly growing district serving over 81,000 students across 162 schools, faced a major communications challenge as its student population became increasingly multilingual. Initially producing translations manually in side-by-side Word documents, the district struggled to meet rising demand—especially from Latin American Spanish speakers—and later had to add a dozen more languages to comply with community needs and federal requirements.

The district adopted SDL Trados Studio (and SDL MultiTerm), appointed Gabriela Aguilar to lead training, and upgraded the software to boost efficiency. As a result, translation requests jumped 70% in the first year, improved a further 62% after MultiTerm, and rose another 49% after the upgrade; the department saved about $40,000, increased PDF leverage from 5% to 65%, now handles 13 languages and about 1.4 million words per year, and has become a model for other districts.

Denver Public Schools

Gabriela Aguilar

Translations Supervisor