It's a Small World After All: Creating an Integrated, Multilingual Microfinance Gateway

The Microfinance Gateway is a resource on microfinance around the world, covering multiple continents and dozens of countries, managed by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP). The Gateway welcomes more than one million annual visitors from over 200 countries, speaking at least four different languages: English, French, Spanish, and Arabic.

We'll tell the story of rebuilding the Gateway, starting from a set of four completely independent sites and ending with a site that fully integrates all four languages into one complete experience. We'll explain how we thought about structuring the experience for visitors to the site, creating a countries section that let them go back and forth between languages, and making organizations multilingual to match the international nature of their work. We'll explain the challenges of fields that are expected to have characters in both Arabic and English. We'll talk about how to develop a a site that allows administrators to link together content so that users can see the right content at the right time.

By attending this talk, you will:

• gain an understanding of why and how users might navigate across a multilingual site,
• have a list of questions to ask about interlinking multilingual content, and
• understand how to leverage Drupal 7 to design a multilingual architecture.