With the start of classes only a week away, Riverland Community College decided Monday to postpone starting its new Translating and Interpreting certification program until spring semester.

Lois Nelson, business consultant with Riverland’s training and development team, said the decision came after organization and time issues had not been resolved at the start of the week. She said the decision was made in order to give enough time to get the program up to standards students deserve.

“Generally, new programs take longer than a 90 day period to throw together,” Nelson said.

Nelson said the decision to implement a translator and interpreter course at Riverland came after she visited Austin, Albert Lea and Owatonna and learned there was a call for a certificate in translating. She said the school learned that Century College in the Twin Cities was already developing a program along those lines, so Riverland decided to partner with the school. The program is collaboration between the Austin campus of Riverland, Century and Rochester Community and Technical College. All the campuses will teach the course, but the certification will be through Century.

“Collaborating is something we need to do more and more of rather than waste time duplicating each other,” Nelson said. “By partnering with Century we are able to respond to the needs in our community.”

Riverland is planning to start the program in January with the beginning of second semester. The program is a 30 credit course with classes held in the evenings and on Saturdays. Nelson said the schedule is designed to accommodate the majority of students who will be working full-time.

“Of the signed up individuals I talked to, about 80 percent are employed,” Nelson said. “We may have some current Riverland students that would like to take up certification. However, since most of the students will be employed, we are scheduling this way.”

Students will do their class work on interactive TVs, which will allow students to interact with students at other schools in the collaboration.

Nelson said the classes were designed to appeal to people who currently work as translators and want to be certified, and those interested in getting into the field of translating.

Classes at Riverland will not change due to the late start. Century will begin its classes on schedule. By the time this paper went to print, Rochester has not confirmed whether it will start classes on schedule.