FACEtime with Our Staff: Cong Wang
Cong Wang is the Director of Translation and Interpretation Services here in the FACE Office. He is a person who has a story rich with twists and turns that brought him to where he is today. “I am a very restless person,” Mr. Wang said. “I consider myself an innovator. I never want to settle on the same path, on the same thing. I always want to try something new. Whether it’s something completely new, or something new within what I do now.”
Mr. Wang has certainly tried things that were completely new to him. Born and raised in China, Mr. Wang came to the U.S. to pursue a graduate degree in Molecular Biology. After spending several years in the field of medical research, Mr. Wang decided to change careers and work toward his Masters in Business Administration at the University of Iowa.
“I had a hunch that I may have trouble working in an environment like this,” Mr. Wang says about his several years in the business world. There was one incident in particular that made him realize this.
During his first year in business school, Mr. Wang had an accounting professor who described a questionable business practice. When asked if the practice was ethical, the professor clarified that the practice was illegal, but ethics were of no concern to the class.
“That was really shocking to me at the time,” Mr. Wang said. In his disappointment and shock, Mr. Wang wrote a letter questioning the ethics of the professor and sent a group email to all of his classmates. While there were several people that came to Mr. Wang’s defense, there was a major uproar across campus. “It got a little ugly, and the university had to change their group emailing policy as a result,” Mr. Wang said. “It was unpleasant.”
He carried these concerns with him into the business world. “I could sense that this was not my calling. I remember that in my email, I said that if you want to be a businessman, you have to be ‘man’ first, you cannot simply be just a creature of profit,” Mr. Wang explained.
After deciding to end his time in the business world, Mr. Wang decided to pursue his childhood dream of becoming a writer. Without knowing or planning it, Mr. Wang was moving closer and closer to language services at each switch in career.
Growing up, Mr. Wang was always an avid reader, and instead of writing his own novels, he began to practice translating some of his favorite American history autobiographies and non-fiction books from English to Chinese. His translation experience started as a hobby, but through a coincidental connection, Mr. Wang sent his translations to a publishing house in China and ended up getting five books published.
His love of American history and a newfound interest in the nonprofit world brought him to Philadelphia. Knowing nobody in the area, he was introduced to some leaders in the Chinese community who were trying to pass a resolution for a Chinese charter school. Mr. Wang helped translate for the Chinese organization working to pass the resolution through the SRC.
One of the women in the organization was spearheading the new language service in the School District of Philadelphia and brought Mr. Wang on as a contract translator. The Language Services Office was officially opened in 2004, and this is when Mr. Wang finally joined the School District of Philadelphia. He worked to translate documents into Chinese and coordinate assignments to all other translators. In 2010, the District opened a new office called the Translation and Interpretation Center (T&I) to make language services more institutionalized and Mr. Wang was appointed as director.
With his business experience and his ethical outlook on hard work, Mr. Wang works tirelessly to make sure the Translation and Interpretation Center produces and provides quality documents and services as efficiently as possible.
“It’s a noble cause, public education is important, but I think it’s equally important to carry out that mission with decent efficiency. The nobleness of the cause cannot justify any inefficiencies,” Mr. Wang said.
The growth of the T&I Center demonstrates Mr. Wang’s efficiency perfectly. Before Mr. Wang started as the director, the District had no website dedicated to translation. Now they have the T&I website as well as websites dedicated to the eight major languages of the school district (Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, French, Khmer, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese).
“I think that’s a major, almost groundbreaking, breakthrough here...We are among the best, if not the best, if you really look at the big cities, I think that we are on par or better. But I would consider our work underappreciated in many ways,” Mr. Wang explained. “I think that if you compare it with other specialized services, services that now people consider to be standard and indispensable, I don’t think language services have elevated to that standard.”
“I would compare our service as in the designing room of a car manufacturer. Basically you design a new model car, then you need to have a dedicated sales force to really push the model car in the showroom, to introduce that to the end-user,” Mr. Wang said. “Then, the end user can offer feedback. The issue here is we hear very little feedback. It’s upon us to improve our service, but it’s also on the end-user to use our services.”
From Mr. Wang’s perspective, the services of the T&I Center are not utilized to their full potential. Optimistically, Mr. Wang said, “I think the political environment is making people think more of the non-English speakers, so hopefully we’ll receive more permanent attention as a standardized service. Particularly given how diverse this school district is.”
