Elsa Perez

2026 Undergraduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award Nominee

College of Arts & Sciences | World Languages and Cultures

Dr. Perez is an Assistant Professor of Translation and Interpretation at the Department of World Languages at Utah State University. Her areas of expertise include machine translation, localization, medical and legal translation, and interpretation. Dr. Perez is directing the new Healthcare Interpretation program. She is a certified legal and medical translator. Her teaching philosophy is focused on community engagement. She is actively participating with healthcare institutions and other non-profit organizations to organize students' experiential learning opportunities. Dr. Perez also teaches and certifies community members to become medical interpreters. Her work has been widely recognized, and she has created an innovative curriculum using video simulations and feedback that has led her to receive external grants to expand this program. Her research focuses on Machine Translation Post-Editing, community-engaged learning, and AI in Translation and Interpreting Education. Before joining USU, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Translation at Brigham Young University in the Spanish and Portuguese Department and an Assistant Professor at Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas, Mexico where she taught legal, financial, and machine translation. Dr. Perez received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Southampton, UK. She received her master’s from Universidad Panamericana and her BA in Spanish Translation from Brigham Young University.