Fostering an Online Multilingual Information Community: from Monolingual to Multilingual Websites

A more effective global sharing of information is now possible given the language tools under development by a host of companies and organisations including Google, AltaVista, WorldLingo, and Plone. As a service to International Waters Projects, IW:LEARN is making these tools available to facilitate improved access to online multilingual information across the GEF IW portfolio.

IW:LEARN has adopted a two-pronged approach in offering its multilingual service to projects. First of all, IW:LEARN has developed a Machine Translation Tool (Fig. 1) that can be readily integrated into a project's website (e.g., www.iwlearn.net), offering visitors the option to translate the page from English to a host of other languages; currently including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.  This tool integrates existing machine translation functionality offered by Google into a simple drop down menu that is simple to use and easily transferable to project websites. It should be mentioned that while machine translation cannot match the accuracy of human translation, it can give a general understanding or 'gist' of the original text. Further customisation of the tool for other languages is also possible.

The importance of offering translated content was reflected at the recent IW:LEARN IT Workshop in Beijing³ where each of the participating projects decided to adopt the Website Toolkit and develop bilingual sites (Fig. 3). The meeting also identified the need for IW:LEARN to create multi-language Toolkits to facilitate development of sites where the default language is not English; IW:LEARN now plans to develop Chinese and Spanish versions of its Toolkit.

Fig. 3. IW:LEARN IT Workshop, Beijing

It is hoped that projects consider multi-language support of their sites. It is recommended that as a minimum a machine translation capability, such as that offered by IW:LEARN's Translation Tool, is integrated into every project website. Such functionality should prove valuable not only to stakeholders directly associated with a given project, but also improve accessibility for the wider GEF community. If accurate human translation is possible, then the Toolkit's in-built multilingual support can be used for displaying translated content. Ideally, a combination of both machine translator and human translated content would best facilitate sharing of multi-language information among projects and partners.