While Penn students are expected to be proficient in English, no such requirement is made for their parents.
To help with this dilemma, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions has been attempting to make the entire admissions process easier for prospective students' parents who are not fluent in English by providing admissions and financial-aid information in Spanish, one of the most common native languages for international students.
The first step in the process is making the materials available online in languages other than English, said Jordan Pascucci, assistant director of on-campus programs in Undergraduate Admissions.
She said they aim to have Spanish materials available online by mid-March. While no tangible efforts have been made to produce materials in languages other than Spanish or English, she added that she would like to see materials in Mandarin Chinese and Korean in the future.
The majority of Penn's Web site traffic is from prospective students and their families, she explained, and the translation will particularly help parents who cannot fully understand the information in English.
"It's also for the parents, to let them know that their children will be comfortable away from home," added College sophomore and Latino Coalition Chairman Cristian Barrios, "and that there are people who look like them and understand their culture."
Pascucci said a geographically diverse team of students are the primary translators.
Though the translating efforts are open to everyone within the University, many of the efforts are being made by work-study students fluent in Spanish and members of Cipactli, the Latino honors society, Barrios added.
Tours in foreign languages can also make the admissions process easier for non-English-speaking parents.
According to Pascucci, multilingual tours have always been available through Kite and Key, the group responsible for undergraduate admissions tours. She said she sends out periodic e-mails to check whether there are bilingual students willing to give tours in other languages.
"It becomes really apparent that there are an enormous amount of students who speak many languages," she said.
However, College sophomore Mark Pan, chairman of the Undergraduate Assembly's Civic and Community Engagement Committee, said when he spoke with Admissions last December he was told that tours were not available in Spanish.
He added that there was no information online about the tours and that he was "under the strong impression that nothing is available."
But while the information might be hard to find, tours are given in foreign languages.
College sophomore Mike Tzeng recently gave a tour in Mandarin to a group of prospective students from Qingdao, China. He explained in an e-mail that when tourers come from different countries, they are accommodated depending on their requests.
"When a tour group contacts us, we reach out to them," Pascucci said.
