Lessons from a Parent: How to improve adolescent behavior using a program proven successful.

A decade ago, The Parent Project, an innovative education institution focusing on strong-willed children and adolescents, contacted us to translate their educational programs.

With more than 30 years of experience, The Parent Project’s mission is to develop parent and teacher training programs for raising and educating difficult or out-of-control children.

The Parent Project is committed to providing highly effective programs that are affordable for every parent.

The Parent Project is now the largest court-mandated juvenile education program in the country and for agencies, the least expensive intervention program available today.

There are three programs:

1. Loving Solutions
2. Changing Destructive Adolescent Behavior
3. Preparing Our Kids for Success

The first program we ever worked for was Changing Destructive Adolescent Behavior which consists on a 10-to-16-week program designed for parents raising difficult adolescents or children, it is also designed for the classroom. Currently, the program is available in both English and Spanish and has different modules for parents and teachers.

The Parent Project needed it to be available in multiple languages since there were many Hispanic-speaking parents who didn’t have the tools to help their children develop in hostile environments such as gang-polluted areas in California and Texas. That’s why they decided to translate the program and make it available to communicate with Spanish-speaking parents.

Idea Translations worked along with the founders of the program -one of them holding a PhD in education- and together we translated the best version possible of the course for it to be easily understood by parents from any background. The original course was translated and now, year after year, our team works on the constant improvements provided by the authors to make it more innovative and interactive.

Thanks to our unique content management software, we maintain a Translation Memory that helps future content to be translated consistently. The biggest challenge has been to create and edit videos with high complexity and convert them from English to Spanish. Moreover, to keep content engaging and useful for parents who are at the core of their kids’ behavioral problems, The Parent Project added a series of exercises that take the program from theory to practice.

Idea Translations’ DTP department has also worked very hard on this project, involved in tasks such as:

• Building PPT for teachers to use as resources
• Creating a workbook for parents
• Creating and editing a workbook for teachers with specific activities.

At the end, we love to hear our clients’ feedback and take all of our projects as a dialogue more than a simple translation. We value our client’s input and are always happy to incorporate their preference and make suggestions to achieve the best possible translated version.