MTM LingaSoft Helps Nursery School Globalize Web Site
Kathy Quinn, MTM LinguaSoft
Myriam Siftar is the president of MTM LinguaSoft, a language service company specializing in the translation and localization of websites, software and online applications. In that role, she has overseen the translation of many websites into Chinese, Arabic, Spanish and other languages, for clients like law firms, manufacturers and technology companies. But recently she had the opportunity to put her skills to work for the community by globalizing the website of St. Mary's Nursery School in West Philadelphia.
St. Mary’s, located on the University of Pennsylvania Campus, is a non-denominational cooperative nursery school that, because it draws from the diverse community in University City, has students from all over the world. Siftar, whose daughter attends the school, believed that the school would benefit from having a website that reflected the school's diversity. When she volunteered to coordinate the project on a pro bono basis the school’s board of directors was enthusiastic about the idea.
Like a lot of companies that do business in foreign markets, St. Mary's had found that reaching out to prospective clients overseas — especially those in Asia — was difficult with just an English language site. According to Andrea Mosko, the school's director, parents from English-speaking countries used the website to get basic information about the school in advance and to make inquiries about the school's policies and programs before they arrived; however, although parents from other countries still sometimes found their way to the school through personal connections, they often arrived with little knowledge about the school. The new website, in French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and Korean versions — with German to come soon — makes it possible to reach out to these parents earlier. It also makes them feel more welcome since it is immediately clear that different languages and cultures are appreciated at the school.
The multilingual website project also got the parents of existing students involved in an exciting way. Parent volunteers handled the most of the initial translations of the site's major pages. MTM LinguaSoft donated the services of professional linguists as proofreaders and translators where needed. The project may have been pro bono, but MTM gave it the same care that it gives to all its projects — converting dozens of graphic elements to the new languages, translating descriptions and key words and changing the coding to work with foreign search engines, and modifying the layout of the pages to accommodate the additional elements.
St. Mary's new site can be found at www.stmarysnursery.org. For more information about MTM LinguaSoft, visit its Web site www.mtmlinguasoft.com.
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