Discover how going multilingual allowed TCI to engage with their communities.
TCI’s innovative approach allows cities to self-select to participate. Cities bring their monetary contributions, ideas and political commitment to the platform. In return, cities have access to a challenge fund for additional resources, as well as technical expertise to adopt and scale up high-impact best practices that have been codified for easy adaptation through TCI University.
This online “university without walls” along with TCI’s coaching model has helped TCI continue operating during the COVID-19 pandemic. TCI now supports 95 cities in implementing urban reproductive health solutions across 10 countries in East Africa, Francophone West Africa, Nigeria and India.
Finding the right translation solution for their multilingual project was vital for TCI given that they’d encountered problems on previous attempts. Their attempt with another plugin failed because it wasn’t compatible with the learning management system on their website, and so they had to find an alternative solution.
Luckily, the team at TCI found the Weglot plugin and haven’t looked back. As they had over 1 million words to translate, they really benefited from Weglot’s hybrid approach to translation. This involves a quick layer of automatic translation on all the site’s content followed by the ability to edit and manage translations via an intuitive translation management dashboard.
There’s also the option to implement these edits via a user-friendly visual editor tool and hire professional translators via the Weglot dashboard to review any important web pages. The team at TCI was also impressed with the media translation capacities of Weglot.
Media localization is an important aspect of any multilingual project and every multilingual site should endeavour to do so. Translating images and other media not only helps web visitors to understand your content, but can also show that you’re sensitive to their culture and are committed to delivering a highly personalized user experience.
A big aim for TCI was to increase overall web traffic, which they did so successfully with the help of Weglot. Using Weglot as their website translation solution meant that their translated web pages were automatically displayed under language specific subdomains as opposed to creating duplicate pages with translated content, which isn’t favored by search engines and can penalize SEO ranking.
In addition to this, multilingual SEO was also taken care of by Weglot as it automatically indexes translated pages following Google best practices. This means that whether web users are searching in English, Hindi, or French for reproductive healthcare or other topics related to TCI, TCI will rank highly on the SERPs (search engine result pages) leading to greater traffic and engagement. In fact, since implementing Weglot the organisation has seen a significant increase in traffic, particularly from West-African countries.
“We really loved the localization features provided by Weglot such as the ability to translate images and other types of media depending on the language the visitor is viewing the site in. Being able to change our graphics and other attachments into French and Hindi is a real benefit to site visitors”