SiO promises English translations

– Up until 2011, all information will be available in both English and Norwegian, but change doesn’t come over night. The promise is made by Nina Langeland, director of public affairs at the Foundation for Student Life in Oslo (SiO).

She shows great understanding for the complaints that were put forward in last week’s Universitas, where the student bodies under SiO were criticised for lack of information to English speaking students.

– Obviously, we have a long way to go when it comes to information to international students, and we are aware of this.

Langeland points out that the webpages belonging to Student Housing, which are used by a lot of students, are already available in both English and Norwegian. SiO plans to go over all of their webpages in order to make them more accessible to English speaking students. One of the changes that has been made is the new «My page» arrangement which allows for the administration of webpages online. The aim is to make this the norm for all of the webpages under SiO within 2011.

– We are currently working with solutions that will work for everyone, whether you are only interested in one of our services or in several different ones. Central to this work is translating the pages into English, she says.

SiO recently carried out a profile survey in connection with the services they offer. The survey shows that more and more students are using SiO’s webpages to find the information they need. In fact, the number of people stating that they had used these pages four times or more during the last semester had increased from 24 per cent in 2005 to 42 per cent in 2007.

However, the profile survey was only distributed in Norwegian, and made no distinction between Norwegian and international students. The next survey will be carried out in 2009.

– We still haven’t decided whether or not we will have an English version for international students, Langeland says.