I came across this site, while researching the grading system in Mexico, that I have found helpful when translating diplomas, transcripts, school certificates, syllabuses and other school-related documents for individuals: http://www.classbase.com/.

On there you can find information on the education system, grading system, academic credentials and a list of universities in a given country. I certainly believe this is not only useful for those translating to or from Spanish, Portuguese or English, but also to or from numerous other languages as this site presents such information for over 200 countries and territories worldwide. Practically every country you could ever think of.

Let’s say you want to look up Brazil and need to figure out the difference between Ensino fundamental (I & II) and Ensino médio. By clicking on “Education System” for this country, you can view a description of each of the two education categories. This is what you would see:

http://www.classbase.com/Countries/Brazil/Education-System

It is widely known that, unless an evaluation service provider, translators usually cannot give target country (i.e. U.S.) equivalents of the grades, degrees or credentials in the translation, and that clients would need to contact a credentials evaluation service provider for that (though I’m sure there is an exception to this!) However, on this same site, under Grading System for any given country, graduates or clients requiring translation of their school records can even consult the GPA calculator to get an idea of the US equivalents of their source country school grades. One can consult and compare Brazilian grades, for example, on the Double Letter Scale:

http://www.foreigncredits.com/Resources/Grade-Conversion/

Pretty cool site and features, I must say. And quite up-to-date, seemingly.

Now over to you readers, thoughts on this site? Any other related webpages or resources you might recommend for translating said documents?