As 2015 kicks off, Gandia Campus UPV’s Research & Scientific Dissemination website is taking a quantum leap forward along with the New Year. From this time forward on, all the content posted on cienciagandia.webs.upv.es will be available in English. With this we have officially become a “trilingual” website (Valencian, Spanish and English) whose main objective is to facilitate published content to the widest range of readers possible. To further this action, the weekly English blog posts will be regularly shared on Twitter and also on Facebook, when considered opportune.
There are powerful motives and reasons behind our decision to make this effort to translate all the posts published in 2014 to English, as well as all the new entries published from now onwards:
- English is the language of science and research. Researchers are keenly aware that all the important scientific journals and conferences are in English. Similarly, the dissemination of scientific advances in the international arena is usually carried out in this language. To this end, we want to help facilitate the collaboration of both public institutions and private companies that do not read scientific publications on a regular basis, but who are active consumers of scientific information on Internet and social media. We want to serve as a window to the projects that originate and are being developed on our Campus and this way help give them greater visibility. With this we will also satisfy an explicit demand made by our research staff, since English is the bridge language of science.
- The strategy of the UPV and the Campus Gandia. Through the Science Communication Unit (CCU) of the Technology Transfer Center, the UPV is committed to popularizing science, both in its own official languages and English, in order to increase the coverage in prestigious international media outlets. The Gandia Campus has joined forces in this commitment and will work closely with the UCC to give international visibility to the scientific work carried out in Gandia and help position the Campus and the city as the center of international relevance that it is. The ultimate aim, especially since it is a public university, is to increase the return on investment made in research by society.
- SEO and online reputation. Content published in this language will reach more people since it will appear in the English search results on platforms such as Slideshare, Flickr or Twitter, and in search engines such as Google. Moreover, we should not overlook the fact that English is the preferred language of the Internet and science. Strategic use of headings, tags, keywords and English text in general improves positioning in searches. With regards to reputation, UPV and Gandia Campus are academic institutions with international projection that are conscious of the need to consolidate and increase this projection on a daily basis, with consequent initiatives to promote this goal in the digital world as well.
This new initiative reinforces the work being carried out in a gradual and sustainable manner for the last three years with other content and social media. Some of the initiatives that have been undertaken thus fare include:
- Video subtitling. The videos relating to the main science and research activities in Gandia Campus can be viewed on YouTube with English subtitles. Example: “La investigación sí funciona” (Research Works).
- Flickr images. Since 2013, images that illustrate the research milestones on the Campus have been collected and compiled. Texts and keyword tags in Catalan, Castilian and English accompany these images.
- Documents, presentation of research activity on the Campus on Slideshare
- Facebook and Twitter. Starting this year, English language content will be shared on our two main Social Media channels: Facebook page and Twitter account.
- Notas de prensa. Desde el 2015, envío de notas de prensa en inglés a medios nacionales e internacionales de aquellas noticias con proyección internacional. Con la colaboración de la UCC.
Finally, we’d simply like to invite you to visit our website in the language of your choice and we look forward to reading your comments and suggestions. We want to continue growing little by little… with a little help from our friends 🙂