Over 5.7 million words of Wikipedia medical content were translated by volunteers in the TWB workspace during the 2011-2018 period . Our heartfelt thanks to the many Translators without Borders contributions to this first stage of the project.
At the beginning of 2019 this project is being relaunched primarily within the Wikipedia - Wikimedia environment, making use of a native translation tool and a translation management tool made available by ProZ.com.
Texts are translated where they are needed the most; currently: diseases, medications and drugs, anatomy, nutrition, sanitation, and women's health. To see our list of articles for translation check out: our summaries.
Language shouldn't be a barrier for health information!
Translated articles need to be integrated into local Wikipedias. This process is done manually and needs to be in harmony with existing local articles.
Writing for translations may be slightly different from writing other articles on Wikipedia. If you are interested in improving articles contact James Heilman (jmh649gmail.com) or simply create a Wikipedia account and start editing.
Why help?
We're working together with Wikipedia Zero to spread knowledge where it is needed the most!
Health care site traffic comparison in July 2014. Light blue portions represent official Wikimedia Foundation data for all medical articles. Other data is estimated from SimilarWeb.[1]
Wikipedia is the most used health care resource on the Internet−both by unique visitors and by pageviews. For all those interested in global health this is an opportunity to help bring high quality healthcare information to the world.
In the beginning effort primarily concentrated on 80 medical articles of global significance. In the month of February 2012 these pages in English received a total of 10.6 million page views.[2]
In 2014 we switched our efforts to a larger number of shorter articles as we believe translating more short articles rather than fewer long articles will have a greater impact. A more in depth breakdown can be found at popular pages of the translation taskforce
As of July 2014, the more than 500 full articles translated via this project received over 1.2 million pages views per month[3] in their local languages.
Press
Imagine if all our health information was available only in Dutch!
Lori Thicke, TwB[4]GlobalVoices-Rising Voices: Translating Health Content Without Borders[5]
We are working to build a world where knowledge doesn't have borders
Lori Thicke, TwB[4]The Guardian: Translators fight the fatal effects of the language gap[6]
"Antidote for a stigma: Translated content on vaccines helps fight a taboo",[7]Times of India, October 22, 2016
"Making Wikipedia’s medical articles accessible in Chinese",[8]Wikimedia Blog, June 2, 2015
"A Fight for Awareness in the Age of Globalization",[9]Huffington Post, October 2, 2014
"Doctors and Translators Are Working Together to Bridge Wikipedia's Medical Language Gap",[10]Global Voices & Wikimedia Blog,[11] July 27, 2014
"Translating Health Content Without Borders",[5]Global Voices, August 30, 2012
"Leveraging the Web to Overcome Challenges in the Developing World",[12]EContent Magazine, July 5, 2012
"Translators fight the fatal effects of the language gap"[13]The Guardian, April 11, 2012
Get in touch!
Doc James
Dr. James Heilman
jmh649gmail.com ER Physician, Project Lead
CFCF
Carl Fredrik Sjöland
cfsjolandgmail.com Medical student, Project Coordinator