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The University of South Wales (USW) is the largest university in Wales and the sixth largest in the United Kingdom. It boasts over 30,000 students, studying at five separate campuses and two partner colleges. Nearly 5,000 of them come from over 120 countries outside the United Kingdom.
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The Business Loft at USW is a co-working business centre which provides start-up and development support. Student and graduate businesses and local businesses can hire a desk for a day or a week on a flexible basis. It also offers mentoring sessions and workshops for start-up businesses.
The need for a multilingual website
In common with most Higher Education organisations, the university engages its many diverse stakeholders with a huge range of non-core projects. It needs to communicate effectively with many different audiences, which includes speaking different languages.
USW can also assess the ease and impact of implementation with a view to rolling it out to other websites and applications, whether for internal use, other stakeholder-focused websites or international student recruitment.
Why LinguaSkin?
Previously, the cost of configuring the site, making sure the alternative language was equivalent, plus ongoing maintenance meant making the site multilingual was unviable. Being easy to implement and cost-effective, LinguaSkin has made this possible at a fraction of the cost.
I don't understand why it works so simply, but it just does. We would never have been able to make our site bilingual before.
Quick to implement
From initiating the project to reviewing the site took one week. Configuration took less than a day. As with all the LinguaSkin implementations, no modifications to the original site were necessary and disruptions were minimal.
Beyond approving the project at the beginning and reviewing the website at the end, I didn’t have to lift a finger!
The Business Loft website is hosted independently of USW’s main corporate website. LinguaSkin’s reverse proxy capability enabled hosting issues to be overcome with LinguaSkin’s Intercept Engine sitting on a separate web server. The resulting capability is similar to that used by proxy localisation tools, although with much easier configuration, deployment and flexibility.
USW’s Business Loft employed Interceptor Solutions to implement LinguaSkin rather than do it themselves. This is a typical approach as it allows an organisation to become familiar with the software before rolling it out across other applications or websites. PRINCE2 methodology was used for the implementation with USW’s Business Loft being kept informed throughout.
Easy to use
USW’s Business Loft elected to use Google Translate for the initial translation. LinguaSkin uses pre-configured rather than real-time translations, so USW’s Business Loft are able to edit and improve this translation through LinguaSkin's online Management Centre as and when they like.
The Management Centre has been deliberately designed to be easy to use for non-technical administrators. In fact, USW’s Business Loft can add as many languages as it wants with no further technical activity or configuration.
It wasn't at all disruptive. I just had to sit with Andy for half an hour to review the website. It's so easy to use.
Cost-effective
In the past, The Business Loft had been unable to consider a bilingual website as the costs were just too high. It would have involved reconfiguring the Content Management System, creating a parallel site for each language, plus ongoing maintenance. Even with a limited budget, LinguaSkin has made a bilingual website a possibility. Implementation was quick and easy and the only ongoing maintenance is content translation where needed.
I can update the website as normal without worrying about maintaining a separate site. I know the content and structure will remain the same and there won’t be any broken links. Even though it’s fully bilingual, there’s just one site to manage and it’s not going to give me a load more work to do. It's brilliant.
Initially, USW’s Business Loft was concerned that using Interceptor Solutions to implement LinguaSkin may add hours of consulting time to the bill. This can be a very real issue with localisation projects, but because LinguaSkin implementation is so quick, its associated costs are small.
USW’s Business Loft pays a single annual subscription fee which covers their license to use the software, maintenance and support, and continual access to the online Management Centre. There was no upfront purchase cost.
We just didn’t have the funds to make the website bilingual before, but LinguaSkin has made that possible for us.
Key Points
- Implemented within a week and configured in less than a day
- Structured approach to implementation
- Comprehensive bilingual capability that is easy to maintain
- Google Translate used for initial translation, with USW able to edit as required.
- Ongoing maintenance of alternative language through easy-to-use Management Centre.
- Cost-effectiveness made bilingual capability possible.
Technical details
| Deployment: | Reverse Proxy on Microsoft Azure |
| Web Server: | Apache |
| CMS: | Wordpress |
| Content Types: | HTML, CSS |
| Num replacements: | 288 |
Acknowledgement of support
Through its Welsh-language Technology and Digital Media Grant, the Welsh Government has funded several LinguaSkin implementation case studies to research the potential of multilingual software interfaces. University of South Wales and Interceptor Solutions acknowledge this support.
