When the Department of Education last week started posting translations of the chancellor’s regulations on its Web site, it decided to begin with Chinese.

The decision was clearly an attempt to clarify the rules for Stuyvesant High School, where parents have been feuding over the recent removal of a Chinese parent leader who was accused of holding a meeting outside the school and of attempting to form a separate Chinese parents’ association, both of which are forbidden under the chancellor’s regulations.

The parents, many of whom speak only limited English, complained that they couldn’t understand the rules listed in the A-660 portion of the regulations because they were written only in English.

A copy of the rules written in Chinese was posted on the Department of Education’s Web site last week.

“There was a demand for it and we wanted to meet it,” a Department of Education spokeswoman, Kelly Devers, said. The department plans to post the regulations that relate directly to parents in the city’s eight most commonly spoken languages by this summer.

The Stuyvesant dispute started late last month when the co-chairwoman of the Chinese outreach committee, Mary Lok, was accused of defying the rules and accordingly was removed from her post.

Earlier this month, Ms. Lok and her supporters packed an executive board meeting of the parents’ association at the highly selective school on Chambers Street to demand an explanation.

At the emotionally charged gathering, the board voted to hold a separate meeting later this month to discuss the issue. The Department of Education has since offered to foot the bill for a professional mediator, but so far neither side has come to an agreement about who would be invited to the table.

Some members claim the dispute stems from infighting among the Chinese parents. Until a few years ago only a few Asian-American parents served on the board, which has now become more diverse.

Simultaneous interpretation in Chinese and Korean has been provided at the monthly parents’ association meetings for the past three years.

More than half of the students at Stuyvesant are Asian-American.

So far, the only thing both sides agree on is the importance of printing the rules governing the association in multiple languages.

“I think it’s the only good thing to come out of this conflict,” the executive director of Chinese-American Communications Incorporated, Teresa Ying Hsu, said of the translation. She is helping to represent Ms. Lok, who claims that she was removed unfairly.

The parents’ association hosted a news conference on Monday and invited the Chinese press to dispel the idea it was “ignoring services to Chinese parents.” The city’s Chinese daily newspapers have been covering the dispute closely since it first flared up weeks ago.

Members of the association claim they have been trying to encourage the Department of Education for years to translate important school documents.

“We are delighted that the Department of Education has published A-660 in Mandarin,” the parents’ association co-presidents, Sumiko Takeda Nakazato and Lauren Coleman-Lochner, said yesterday via e-mail. They called it a “good first step” but said it needed to be followed by the translation of other documents.

The City Council passed a bill late last year that would require report cards and other school papers to be translated into up to eight languages. More than one in three New Yorkers are foreign-born, according to the 2000 Census.

The bill, the Education Equity Act, also would require interpretation service at school meetings. It was expected to cost the city $20 million. Mayor Bloomberg vetoed the bill last month, accusing the council of overstepping its jurisdiction and claiming that under state law only Albany or the Department of Education can legislate education issues.