Overview
WWU’s Small Business Development Center (SBDC) offers mentorship for small-businesses in Whatcom and Skagit County. The SBDC realized that they were missing out on a rapidly growing segment of the local population, Spanish-speaking business owners. By offering business services in the native language of their clients, the SBDC hoped to increase the reach of their services, helping more clients access a number of resources available to them.
Goal
Before, when a person with limited English proficiency visited the SBDC website, there was a significant language barrier. And when the SBDC received phone calls after hours from people who did not speak English, those calls were routed to the voicemail of one of the bilingual staff members. Unfortunately, when bilingual staff members were on vacation, or not physically present, it was several days before those messages were translated and addressed.
Our goal was to present information for small business owners to create a more welcoming experience, whether their native language was English or Spanish, allowing those business owners to concentrate on what they do best and help their customers.
Strategy
The first step was to ensure users that Spanish content was available. We worked with a local translator to ensure the content was accurate, matching the English content on the site. We enabled 4 multilingual modules on the website, (Language, Interface Translation, Content translation and Configuration Translations) and added Spanish as a language option.
Then we built out the new Spanish pages, making certain to set the language field to Spanish instead of English. We rechecked all the content after edits were made to ensure the content flowed as expected on the page, really striving to match the look and feel of the English content to give all website visitors an aesthetically pleasing visual appearance. The main navigation was updated to include Spanish, alerting visitors to the Spanish section of the website. Local print ads written in Spanish directed users to that section of the site.
Once the site has been migrated to Drupal 10 (sometime in 2024), additional language translations will be offered through the Drupal translation module.
*Note, the SBDC site was built in Drupal 8, prior to Drupal 10's multilingual modules were a part of core.