Double The Language, Double The Fun: Sustainability Efforts In Bilingual Data Repositories

Since 2016, Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository, has been paving the way for a bilingual research data repository offered in Canada’s two official languages, French and English. Moving beyond the initial efforts of the Dataverse internationalization group to create multilingual platforms, Borealis has been scaling up to offer bilingual support, monthly community meetings hosted in French and English, and bilingual documentation and guides, while also contributing its Canadian French code to the Dataverse community in support of open data practices. Offering bilingual service on a national scale is a tall order and requires duplicating efforts and dedicating significant capacity. A central pillar of Borealis’ translation overhaul was the development of a translation tool in collaboration with the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. Amongst Borealis chief priorities was the revival of collaboration and partnership in the internationalization of Dataverse instances worldwide. This collaboration aims to foster sharing of practices, processes, and tools, as well as support capacity building. This presentation will share the progress on these initiatives and focus on outlining sustainable wide-scale bilingual efforts. I will discuss the coordination efforts across the internationalization community to promote capacity building, share tools, methods, and practices, and highlight the key challenges and barriers to sustainability.