I have done thousands of translations of academic transcripts from many countries since 1982. These translations normally must be certified and a great many clients ask that I provide a G.P.A..
The ensuing exchange with the customer can be exhausting, because some clients simply do not understand that a translation is provided and certified as a literal translation and cannot be interpretative in terms of grade and content. The best we can do is linguistic interpretation, for instance, providing the rendering “High School Transcript” for Spanish “Bachillerato” (in most, but not all countries), because that is a linguistic issue: a Bachelor’s degree, we all know, is a college degree in English, after all.
However, calculating G.P.A.s in the American system is beyond my authority as a translator. There would be no problem If all grading systems in the world were standard. However, some grading systems range from 0 to 5, others from 0 to 100, yet others from 0 to 20. In some institutions a D is a failing grade, just a few have letter grades outside the USA, and some assign phrasal/word evaluations (Very Good, Satisfactory, Poor, etc.) with no numerical equivalence. Many institutions grade on a curve, others on an absolute basis. Some just issue Pass and Fail grades. In other words, it is a mess, no ISO Standard here.
In the end, most clients accept that the academic evaluation must be done by a company member of NACES, which is the association created by historically recognized evaluators fo self-accreditation of its members. Last I heard, such GPA evaluations are quite subjective and can vary greatly from company to company, so there is no consensus. Some companies which are not members of NACES do provide such services, but these can be rejected, but many get away with it.
While a few NACES members provide both translation and evaluation, this combo tends to be more expensive (and take longer) than if I or another translator do the translation, and the document is evaluated by the likes of World Education Services.
Carlos de Paula is one of the top Brazilian Portuguese translators in the USA since 1982. And now a top Portuguese AI Translation editor as well.
#translation #academia #university #education
